Early adopters boost Leopard sales for Apple
About 9 percent of the Mac OS X installed base upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard over the weekend, according to figures released by Apple and estimates supplied by financial analysts.
Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard between Friday and Sunday night, which includes sales of boxed copies, online sales, and new Macs with Leopard preinstalled. When Apple launched Tiger, it took the company 39 days to hit the 2 million mark on a much smaller installed base.
Apple sold two million copies of Leopard between Friday night's launch event and Sunday.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Piper Jaffray released a research note Tuesday estimating that the Mac OS X installed base is around 23 million users at the moment, as compared with the 12 million Mac users that existed in April 2005 when Tiger launched. At the 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the Mac OS X installed base was 22 million users.
It's tough to get a direct comparison, but because everyone loves comparisons, Microsoft sold 20 million copies of Windows Vista in the first month it went on sale. Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the Windows installed base would be around 1 billion users by the end of the company's 2008 fiscal year, which comes to a close next June. And as of last week, it had sold 88 million copies of Vista.
Likewise, it's tough to get a sense of the current installed base of Windows PCs. If you subtract some generous projections for PC shipments over the next nine months from the 1 billion target, you get around 800 million Windows users. That's far from a perfect number, however, since many of the PCs that will be purchased between now and next June will most likely replace older Windows PCs.
Still, people in emerging markets are buying PCs for the first time--and buying a lot of them--so the expansion of the Windows installed base does move in step with the expansion of the overall market to a certain degree. Let's split the difference and assume there are 900 million Windows users as of right now. That would be mean that almost the same percentage of Windows users have upgraded to Vista in nine months as the percentage of Mac users that upgraded to Leopard in two days.
Let's be clear: these are different types of markets, and they have different motivations for upgrading. Almost all the Vista upgrades so far have been consumer and small business purchases, and businesses will probably start to upgrade in greater numbers next year following the release of Vista Service Pack 1 and as the PCs bought during the boom years of 2004 and 2005 begin to age.
Still, it's pretty clear the Mac installed base was more excited about Leopard than the Windows installed base was about Vista. Maybe that's because Mac users hold onto their machines for a longer period of time and like to upgrade, while Windows users just wait until they need a new PC. Or perhaps it's because Apple does a better job marketing its releases, or because Windows customers have been trained to wait until the first service pack comes out before upgrading. Any way you slice it, however, it's interesting stuff.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
Oh, that's right; there's nothing they can say this go 'round ;)
Cheers! (and solid article!)
/P
there is absolutely no reason for us to switch from XP to Vista on
our present computers..!! The processors, ram, video cards all all at minimal requirements for XP in our offices, why should we spend
the money to upgrade those components then shell out even more
money for an operating system when what we already have is
already doing everything we expect of it..?!?
associated with updating to a new version of OS. If your systems
work fine as they are and your processes do not require to run a
specific piece of software that only runs on Vista, it is best to
avoid any major changes like upgrading to a new OS.
Our MIS department is actually warning staff members to avoid
upgrading their home machines to Vista at least until Microsoft
releases a patch for it. They are only recommending Vista if
people get it with a new hardware purchase.
than the other? The author points out several times it is merely an
interesting comparison. And it is. Before you comment next time,
please READ the article. Thanks.
PC games suck now, you can play WoW on a Mac... *tackles self*
Damn you Steve...
Unlike a few pieces of software that I have (Toast 8 Titanium from
Roxio), Blizzard Entertainment must have done something right
since I upgraded to Leopard on Friday when it became available
and WoW kept right on working with no problems.
I tend to agree with you... don't care about market share and I don't care about when it was released. Hard numbers...right now Leopard as sold 2 million copies to Vista's 88 million.
And, Leopard certainly outsold Windows this weekend, even in absolute numbers (interesting)...but it won't maintain that, and it won't catch up either (that is where marketshare and time of release become important).
Still, Steve doesn't need to beat Windows just yet. When you are sitting at 5% marketshare, 10% marketshare....while still puny and Microsoft won't notice the loss...it really doubles Apple's very profitable mac business. They are already a company in the ranks of HP, Google, and Dell in terms of market cap...I have to think doubling the marketshare can only help.
Ok so we had systems running at 100's mega flops in the home ten years ago were now at 100's of giga flops.
10 years from now 100's of terra flops maybe.
10 years after that 100's of peta flops.
10 years after that 100's of exa flops.
Ok so progress may not be that rapid but by this scale within 30 years we've already got a home computer capable of simulating perfectly the human brain right down to its molecular science in real time far more power than you would need to make the first advnced AI brain so obviously the people claiming these estimates we're overly pesimistic.
Ok so in terms of algorythm science we have good algorythms for walking and co-ordinating but not for higher brain functions.
It looks like we will need to know more about our own intelligence before we can understand how to build AI.
In terms of processing performance this means the first AI system won't lightly be to effcient when first built.
So anyway 1 advanced AI brain well designed would only need a few tens of peta flops of computing power but we're probably looking at the first test systems capable of higher functions using more cumbersom design due to the way theresearch got their. So the first working advanced AI systems will probably need about 120 to 480 peta flops and will probably be rather slow at what they do.
However onece the technology is fully understood the processing requirement will be brought down to only using a couple of tens of peta flops.
So heres a question when will we have high end systems to experiment with to develop AI that run at around the 0.5 to 0.8 exa flops required to develop the fist Advanced AI systems.
Well if you consider a 15 - 30 tera flop slim server or blade will be avalible by the mid 10's and with 30,000 or so of them you'll have easily 0.3+ exa flops to work with.
So the Answer is not long after 2015 we should be giving birth to AI and by the mid 20 AI should be common place although not that good on your home computer.
simulating perfectly the human brain right down to its molecular
science in real time far more power than you would need to
make the first advnced AI brain"
I really find this hard to believe... even in the math's perspective,
i'm not even sure that that amount of peta flops are sufficient to
simulate a human brain. vision and memory storage are still far
from reachable (surely more than 30 years from now). and:
"onece the technology is fully understood the processing
requirement will be brought down to only using a couple of tens
of peta flops."
"obviously the people claiming these estimates we're overly
pesimistic"
i think your claims are VERY optimistic, quite frankly,
unpractical.
having said that, i think it's important to mention that AI is
already in our midst: decision making and information
extrapolation (firsts steps towards brain simulation) has been
achieved (some decades ago)...
so i don't know what to say, other than WHAT THE HELL DOES
THIS HAS TO DO WITH THE ARTICLE!!!
Did I mention it was a beta version?
Still is :)
retail channel have been so weak.
Once people got a look at it, they stayed away in droves.
machines that cost $3k per model over 4 years is cheaper than
buying one machine for $5k that lasts the same time
competitively. If CEO's ever took their CIO's to task for their
purchasing decisions and the IT costs that their lack of
computer knowledge mandates in support costs for Windows,
nearly every CIO in America would be fired over night.
Windows is still junk software and Vista has taken a definitive
step backwards. The folks that are clinging to their copies of
Windows OS, are shamelessly stubborn folks who have sadly
stopped moving forward in the technical future that is
uncontrollably continuing to evolve.
Windows is dead; Vista couldn't be more clear about that. OS X is
the single best operating system in the world, and the total lack
of crashes and superior software tools on the operating system
prove just that.
As a mac user who switched to Mac about 3 years ago, I'm a bit biased toward Max OS. I do think that it is superior to Windows in many, many ways. (My intel Mac that I bought in April has been running constantly since then except once when I had to unplug it to paint the room it's and once for a software upgrade that required a reboot)
BUT to say that Windows is dead is a bit much. As the story said, Windows has an installed base of 1B users so it's not going anywhere soon.
However, I do think that Microsoft is in trouble with its "core" revenue and profit generators (Windows and Office) in that they have yet to show their big bread-and-butter customers [businesses] the value in upgrading. Those corporate license agreements are incredibly expensive, and I think that financials (and not stability) is going to be the main objection to upgrading both Windows and the office suites.
Where is the added value for these companies? Tell me why they should upgrade at considerable cost?
People who game typically need new computers to stay with the times and technical demands of the games. Also, most games stay exclusively to PC.
Not really arguing your point, but just an alternate avenue of thought. Obviously if the mac can run windows and play my copy of Crysis just as well (if not better) then sure, mac all the way.
Right now Windows is the only option among commercial software.
- No competition, whatsoever.
- by blds January 10, 2008 4:11 PM PST
- Let's face it,
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(31 Comments)Mac will NEVER be windows.
And yeah, Leopard is selling really well,
But as mac users increase, windows users are increasing too. Vista is a very good operating system, but basically, it seems built to be capible for windows 7, which is a WAY different system then any windows system before it. And the reason i'm assuming this is because of its Future ready program on vista. Obviosly there are some flaws to vista, but i have seen some HARSH flaws for leopard, too. One guy couldn't even copy and paste, and many people have had trouble with their object dock when upgradng to leopard. While vista has some compatibilty issues? Maybe you shouldn't be putting your cruddy 15 year old printer on it.. And, at the rate things are going for vista, i dont think some compatibility issues are really effecting it, AT ALL. But lets face it, with 88 million copies of vista, in about a year or so. Is PRET-TY impressive. And 20 million copies of vista