Leopard's 2,000,000 weekend

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 31 October 2007 03:11

Business IT - Technology

Apple sold two million copies of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on its first weekend, including those shipped to customers with maintenance licences.

At $US129 per copy, that would be $US258 million - not quite as much as the $US300 million achieved by the Xbox 360 game Halo 3 in its first week, but in much the same ballpark.

We don't know how many maintenance licensing customers were included, and that would reduce the revenue figure. Conversely, Apple's announcement specified copies not licences, so any Family Packs sold would work to boost revenue.

Make a modest allowance for sales early this week, and it's probably fair to say that ten percent of Leopard-capable Macs now have the new operating system. (Apple chief operating officer Timothy Cook recently said the installed base of Macs that could run Leopard numbers 21 million.)

There was a lot of ballyhoo over the Halo 3 sales, but this news - on top of Microsoft selling more than 20 million copies of Vista in its first month as a retail product - helps put the Halo 3 numbers into perspective. How meaningful is it to compare sales of a game with those of an operating system? Not very, but probably about as meaningful as comparing them with movie box office results.

A more interesting question is how many copies of Mac OS X 10.5 have actually been installed? That's a tough one. The biggest barrier to making an estimate is the unknown number of maintenance customers. There will be some exceptions, but I would expect them to be the type that takes a methodical approach to upgrades. They will initially upgrade one or two systems as a test, and carefully the check compatibility of the applications they use ahead of a rollout across the organisation.

Compatibility issues may also mean some retail copies remain on users' shelves for a while. We've already reported on issues with FileMaker Pro, Adobe has identified several incompatibilities [PDF] (updates for After Effects, Encore, Premiere and Soundbooth are planned for December, while Acrobat and Reader should be updated by the end of January 2008), and Microsoft is putting out mixed messages about Office 2004, saying on one hand that "Office 2004 itself works just fine with Leopard", yet on the other noting that during the testing process "We found a few issues in our own code as well, and plan to update Mac Office 2004 shortly." Presumably they are very minor issues.

While certain applications are so important to some people that their absence is a show stopper, others are adequately served by Mac OS X's built-in PDF support and Apple's own iLife and iWork suites.

Not that Apple's own applications are completely faultless when running under  Leopard. The company recommends that Aperture libraries should be excluded from Time Machine backups to avoid "inconsistencies in the Aperture database."