Leopard Reaches 9% of Mac Users in 4 Days
How did Leopard sell?
Very well indeed. In a press release issued this morning, Apple (AAPL) announced that it had sold or delivered more than 2 million copies of OS X 10.5 in its first weekend on the market. OS X Tiger, by comparison, took nearly six weeks to reach the 2 million mark. That makes the launch of Leopard the most successful OS release in Apple’s history.
“These numbers show the Mac user base is growing,” writes PiperJaffray’s Gene Munster. “It also shows that it is an unusually active user base, with 9% of the approximately 23 million users upgrading in the first four days.” He notes that there were half as many Macs in circulation in April 2005 when Tiger was released, yet it took Tiger nearly ten times as long to reach 2 million sales.
Comparative sales figures for Microsoft’s (MSFT) Vista operating system were not immediately available, but the company is said to have licensed 20 million copies in its first month, a number Leopard is unlikely to surpass. But that’s comparing apples and oranges, given the relative size of their respective user bases. Last week Microsoft reported that it had sold 88 million copies of Vista in nine months, representing less than 9% of the worldwide installed base of roughly 1 billion Windows machines.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
Is that 20 million user base a US only estimate? It seems a bit low for worldwide…
ex ped: I believe Munster’s 23 million is worldwide OS X. Someone from Apple — Tim Cook, as I recall — said there were 21 million Macs capable of running Leopard. I don’t think either is including legacy Apple computers running systems 9 or earlier. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt