Apple has no numbers to compare with the 140 million copies of Vista that Bill Gates says Microsoft (MSFT) has sold since the latest version of Windows started shipping in late 2006. (link)

Literally, no numbers. The last time Apple (AAPL) released a Leopard sales figure was Oct. 30, 2007, when the company said that it had sold more than 2 million copies of Leopard in one long weekend (see here). Apple reported $170 million revenue from Leopard sales in the December ‘07 quarter, but that represents fewer than 1.3 million copies. Apple also sold 2.32 million Macs that quarter, more than 2/3 of which probably had Leopard pre-installed.

Even so, the two operating systems aren’t even playing in the same ballpark when it comes to raw sales.

Of course, Vista was greeted with brickbats and Leopard with raves, but Gates didn’t dwell on that in Tokyo Wednesday, where he gave his Japanese partners an update on how Vista is doing. “That’s a very rapid sales rate,” he said.

Not necessarily.

“The most significant number,” says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, “is Apple’s upgrade penetration vs. Microsoft’s. Apple estimated that about 19% of the OS X user base was on Leopard by the end of its launch quarter. By my math, Vista is used by about 12%-14% of the Windows user base more than a year after its retail launch.”

It’s been almost a decade since Steve Jobs drove the last of the licensed Mac clones out of business, but that hasn’t stopped bargain hunting users from trying to get the Mac experience without feeding Apple’s hefty profit margins.

Persuading a generic PC to run OS X isn’t that hard to do. Ever since Apple (AAPL) switched from PowerPC to Intel, hackers in the OSx86 movement have been playing cat-and-mouse with Cupertino, writing a series of patches and emulators to get around the Mac’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and other built-in barriers to cloning.

But the $399 Mac compatible computer that hit the market this week is another matter. It’s a cease-and-desist order waiting to happen.

The manufacturer is a small, Miami-based reseller of Voice-over-Internet, security and networking systems called Psystar. Its website invites you to order a PC “capable of running unmodified OS X Leopard kernels” with the following specs:

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB of DDR2 667 memory
• Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• 20x DVD+/-R Drive
• 4 USB Ports
• 250GB 7200RPM Drive

Basically, it’s a Mac Mini with twice the memory at half the price. So what’s not to love?

The problem for Psystar — and anyone counting on them to stay in business and provide the support they promise — is the second part of their offer: If you buy a copy of Leopard at the same time, they promise preinstall it for free.

That’s where Apple’s lawyers come in. Leopard’s End User License Agreement (EULA) is pretty clear. Section 2A reads:

This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.

And that’s what’s wrong with this $399 Mac.

Here’s one way to get moved to the head of the genius line: complain about your problem on a radio show carried by 650 stations across the U.S.

On Feb. 12, Rush Limbaugh, a self-proclaimed “big Mac guy,” talked about two problems he was having with his computers after upgrading to Leopard — one with how his mail was getting backed up in Time Machine and the other with seeing his various “top of the line Mac Pros” through Back to My Mac.

“I’ve been very patient with my Apple rep, with my developer rep, and they’re working hard on it,” he said on the air, “but nothing gets done! All use file reports and get lost in the Apple bureaucratic system.”

“Do you think I ought to make an appeal, a direct appeal to Steve Jobs from behind the Golden EIB Microphone?” he asked his staff, one of whom joked: “His reply is going to be, ‘Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows’.” (link)

We don’t know what, if anything, Apple’s (AAPL) CEO actually said, but Limbaugh got the TLC he craved. He reported yesterday that both his problems have been solved “through the diligent work of an engineer that Apple assigned my IT guy.”

I’m not going to mention the name of the engineer. I would love to, but if I did, this guy would be taking heat for the rest of his career from people for helping me. But they were very cooperative, and I think it’s going to end up having to be a system-wide fix, which is good, because it’s been discovered. (link)

There may be a patch for the e-mail problem in a future operating system upgrade, Limbaugh said, suggesting modestly that Apple might even name it after him.

With 2008 only a day away, most of the 2007 year’s-best lists have come in, and Apple (AAPL) placed at or near the top of more than its share. Among the prizes its products took home this year:

• Amazon Most Loved Computer: Apple MacBookPro
• Amazon Most-Gifted Computer: Apple MacBook
• Amazon Most-Wished-For Electronics: Apple 4 GB iPod nano
• Amazon Most-Gifted Electronics: Apple 4 GB iPod nano
• Amazon Most-Loved Software: OS X 10.5 Leopard
• NY Times “Pogies”: iPhone’s visual voicemail (No. 1)
• PC World’s Most Innovative: iPhone (No. 2 after Google Gears) and Time Machine (No. 4)
• Macworld Hardware “Eddys”: AirPort Extreme, iPhone, iPod nano
• Macworld Software “Eddys”: iWork ‘08, OS X 10.5 Leopard
• TIME Magazine’s Invention of the Year: iPhone
• TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Gadgets: iPhone (No. 1)

After taking a brief October dip in advance of Leopard’s release, Apple’s (AAPL) share of the operating system market grew 3.34% in November to hit a record 6.81%, according to the results of a Net Applications survey issued today.

Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows in its various flavors continues to dominate with a 92.42% share, as measured by the Web metrics firm. Among the operating systems gathered in the “other” category are Linux (.57%), Apple’s iPhone (.09%), Sony’s Playstation (.02%), SunOS (.01%) and Nintendo’s Wii (.01%).

Net Applications’ monthly surveys do not measure market share in terms of computer systems sold. Rather, they sample data from visitors to some 40,000 websites operated by their clients. As such, their findings are probably better described as a snapshot of installed base taken from a less than random sample. But they do reflect market share trends, and it’s always interesting to compare their results with those from firms like Gartner and IDC, which track quarterly shipments.

Net Applications’ October report, for example, showed Apple with a 6.61% market share. A couple weeks earlier, IDC had calculated Apple’s domestic market share in terms of units shipped in the 3rd quarter at 6.3% while Gartner’s estimate for the same period came in at 8.1%. (link)

Net Applications’ November results are summarized in the table below:

A few bits of Apple (AAPL) news worth noting:

Paul McCartney: “It’s all happening soon,” he told Billboard.com. “Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning. I’m pretty sure it’ll be happening next year, 2008.” (link)

“Let me put that statement into American English,” says Fake Steve Jobs. “Paul wants more money.”

First Leopard Update: More than a dozen improvements in Mac OS X 10.5.1, issued three weeks after Leopard’s release, including fixes in Mail, Airport, Time Machine, Back to My Mac and some pesky Firewall issues. Not yet repaired: Among the repairs: that nasty core data bug.

iMac Anti-freeze: Apple also released a graphics firmware update that’s supposed to finally solve the freezing problem some aluminum iMac users have been suffering since September. I’ll believe it when my Dad tells me his iMac has gone more than a week without crashing.

Three New Mac Ads: The Get-a-Mac ads are back on TV (and available from Apple here) after a summer hiatus. “Same joke,” writes Michael Gartenberg. “Still as effective.” But maybe not quite as funny.

This is interesting.

Nearly three weeks after Apple (AAPL) started shipping Leopard, the sixth version of its flagship operating system, and urged Mac users around the world to step up to OS X 10.5, it has just released the largest software update in memory for its previous two versions, Tiger and Panther.

The major improvement in OS 10.4.11, besides a slew of scary sounding security patches, is that it gives Tiger users Safari 3.0, the version of Apple’s Web browser that was included in Leopard’s $129 purchase price. But there are changes across the board, including upgrades in most of Apple’s pro products. See the official list below the fold.

According to John Gruber, writing in Daring Fireball, this is the first time he can remember Apple delivering a point upgrade (i.e. to .11) to the previous Mac OS X generation after the release of a new one. As more than one commenter has remarked, it shows unusual concern in a personal computer company for its legacy users.

Software update OS X Version 10.4.11 is a monster, weighing in at 321.5 megs in its largest configuration (combo update for Intel Macs), a download that would take, as Tidbits points out, 18 hours over a dial-up modem or 3 minutes via a home fiber link.

Apple recommends that you backup your files before upgrading and warns that you “may experience unexpected results if you have third-party system software modifications installed, or if you’ve modified the operating system through other means.”

But judging from early returns in the Apple.com discussion boards, the software update appears to be relatively problem-free. The main complaint — that the weather and stock widgets were broken — seems to stem from problems at Apple’s end. Perhaps its server farms are busy delivering those 321.5 meg files.

You can get the upgrade through the usual Software Update function or by clicking on one of these links.

• Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combo Update (PPC) – 180.8MB
• Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update (Intel) – 128MB
• Mac OS X 10.4.11 Combo Update (Intel) – 321.5MB
• Mac OS X 10.4.11 Update (PPC) – 67.9MB

Below the fold, Apple’s list of improvements:

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.

Most consumers thinking about buying Apple’s (AAPL) new Leopard operating system will learn what they need to know from the first wave of reviews — the ones written by journalists who were given pre-loaded, pre-release copies of OS X 10.5 and had a week to play with it.

But the review that programmers were waiting for was the one by fellow developer John Siracusa, the Ars Technica columnist who wrote the definitive assessments of the previous five versions of OS X — and has been described as the guy who should be in charge of Finder development at Apple.

Siracusa took careful notes at the Apple developers conferences and has been living with Leopard since the first seed was released. His review came out on Sunday, and it’s a doozy — long, deep, painstaking detailed, and unafraid to call ‘em like he sees ‘em.

He lays out his criteria right at the top:

And as I see it, operating system beauty is more than skin deep. While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard’s worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple’s web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what’s really changed.

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they’re based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user. (link)

True to his word, Siracusa gives us two reviews — a user’s view of the look and feel of the OS and a developer’s view of the stuff going on under the hood.

The stuff under the hood gets high marks. The terms that come up over and over are “sensible,” “pragmatic” and “compromise.” A typical summary graph:

The minimal, almost humble way Core Animation integrates with Cocoa belies its incredible sophistication. More so than any other new framework in Leopard, Core Animation provides functionality and performance that was previously difficult or impossible for the average Cocoa programmer to create on his own. Now, finally, third-party applications can look as impressive as Apple’s, and they can do so by using exactly the same code that Apple’s using—code written by expert graphics programmers and continually revised and improved by Apple to take advantage of the latest hardware. Excellent.

About the hood itself, he’s not so kind. A hard taskmaster when it comes to user interfaces, Siracusa faults Apple again and again for choosing flash over usability. He sums up the problem — and speculates about its source — in two damning paragraphs:

Leopard’s new look has been compared to the Aero Glass look in Windows Vista. While I think there are few legitimate similarities, this comparison comes up as often as it does because the two designs share one prominent attribute: the gratuitous, inappropriate use of translucency to the detriment of usability.

Why, Apple? Why!? Was there something horribly wrong with the existing menu bar—something that could only be fixed by injuring its legibility? Like the folder icons and the Dock, it’s not so much a fatal flaw in and of itself. It’s what it implies about the situation at Apple that is so troubling. What in the holy hell has to happen in a meeting for this idea to get the green light? Is this the dark side of Steve Jobs’s iron-fisted rule—that there’s always a risk that an obviously ridiculous and horrible idea will be expressed in his presence and he’ll (inexplicably) latch onto it and make it happen? Ugh, I don’t even want to think about it.

Even if you never wrote or hope to write a line of code, you’ll learn a lot about Apple, its operating systems and the future of Macintosh applications from reading Siracusa. Highly recommended.

Apple (AAPL) just released OS X 10.5 Leopard, but a team of programmers has already figured out how to install the new operating system on off-the-shelf Intel PCs. See DailyApps‘ tutorial here for step-by-step instructions.

The procedure is still experimental and has not been thoroughly tested. Some system preferences, like Sound and Network, may never work.

It’s a tour de force nonetheless, one that reminds us of the remark Samuel Johnson made in less enlightened times about women preachers. Like a dog walking on his hind legs, he said, “It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Warning: Using Leopard this way is a violation of Apple’s license agreement, which states: “This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.”

[Image courtesy of mac.nub]