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Apple: Yo, I Got Ya 'Wow' Right Here

October 30, 2007 at 11:17 am PT

That gold master copy of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard that appeared on the Torrent indices last Thursday morning–24 hours before the operating system’s official launch–didn’t have much of an effect on sales. In a press release broadcast this morning, Apple said it sold or delivered more than 2 million copies of Leopard in its first weekend at market.

An impressive number, and one that took Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger–once “Apple’s fastest selling OS release ever”–39 days to hit. Said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “Early indications are that Leopard will be a huge hit with customers.”

Certainly appears that way. “These numbers show the Mac user base is growing,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a research note. “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.” Clearly, Mac users are quite a bit more excited about Leopard than Windows users are about Vista.

Tagged with: Apple, John Paczkowski, Leopard, Mac, Steve Jobs, Tiger, Vista, Windows

comments so far. Add yours.

http://allthingsd.com/ Michael Long

I hate stories like this. I could just as easily written, “With free torrent downloads easily available over 24 hours before the official launch, Apple only managed to sell 2 million copies of Leopard to its supposedly “loyal” fan base.

Both stories would be equally correct, in that neither you nor I know exactly what impact all of those “free” copies had on sales.
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com John Paczkowski

Perhaps. But it never would have read well – no matter how you finessed it.

“With free torrent downloads easily available over 24 hours before the official launch, Apple managed to sell only 2 million copies of Leopard to its supposedly “loyal” fan base.”
… In a statement issued Tuesday, a dismayed Apple admitted that first weekend sales figures for Leopard had far outpaced those of its predecessor OS X 10.4 Tiger, making it the most successful OS launch in the company’s history. “Early indications are that Leopard will be a huge hit with customers,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, presumably refering to those who’d pirated the OS. “Leopard’s innovative features are getting great reviews and making more people than ever think about switching to the Mac.”

Apple shares closed Tuesday at US$187 – a new all-time high for the company.
http://allthingsd.com/ Eric Welch

It’s also been reported that many of the torrent users were actually buyers who didn’t want to wait for the FedEx truck to arrive. (See arstechnica.) My copy of Leopard was late because of a FedEx plane mechanical failure, complicated by the San Diego fires. I’m patient.

Breaking out the numbers here with a negative spin says more about the spinner than the spinee.