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anyone know how this compares to Vista on a relative scale of installed user base?

My PB 550 is obsolete now. Time to get a new Mac.
I need coffee.......

M$ only gives figures concerning "items shipped." They haven't said how many copies of vista have actually "sold."

Vista has something like 80 million adopters so far,
and more lemmings jumping off the cliff every day.
Of course, that number may slow now that Leopards out.

@aCe

Vista has sold 88 million copies to date, which is equal to about 3x the entire Mac user base.

I gonna wait a coupla months till the price goes down....

Here's a list.

Tens of millions have bought a Vista PC without even knowing what an OS is.

With the new Mail and iCal working so well together, just emailing myself copies of sports schedules, I can add them to iCal with no problem. And since G-Mail added IMAP, Mail is worth using now. Thank God they added IMAP.

Tre, I don't think you have any idea how large the Mac user base is.

@Chris

In the latest quarterly conference call, Oppenheimer estimated that the OSX user base was roughly 25 million.

2 million is a nice number. bought contracts yesterday, awaiting Leopard news. there are few tech companies outside of AAPL, GOOG, BIDU, VMW, RIMM that can give you an eventual return.

Out of the ones mentioned, AAPL (maybe BIDU) has the greatest potential to grow it's bottom line. It's "small" PC marketshare weighs in favor of AAPL owners now. MSFT has alot of baggage and Halo pretty much saved Xbox. The market is already Windows saturated. So, who cares about MAC OS X marketshare, as long as Apple's bottom line beats expectations each quarter.

Tre:

You must work for Microsoft distribution, are in a senior position at MS or just don't read, as it's already been stated, that MS does not announce how many copies of Vista are sold, only those that are in channel [ie. "sold" to OEMs].

So maybe Vista has 88m copies in channel. But that doesn't put them in the hands of consumer end-users. I can certainly tell you that large/medium-sized corporations have not yet upgraded to Vista. There's too much at stake.

The animals get hungry when we don't get our annual OS update.

There's no way anytime soon (if ever) that OS X will "outsell" Vista, but to me what would be a VERY telling statistic, is how many copies of Vista were online or in-store sales to small businesses and consumers who bought, specifically, a shrink-wrapped copy.

If you buy a Doze box you are *NOT* buying Doze; it's just something included in the price of the computer. And the millions of corporate Doze boxes are parcelled out to alot of unwilling workers like me.

On the other hand, those 2M Leopards have been, or will be, sold to those individuals who are purposely and willingly buying a particular OS. Big difference.

Those kind of statistics are around I'm sure. M$ probably would be embarressed by how relatively close OS X really is using free-will purchases.

In perspective...

Over the weekend, AAPL added a quarter of a billion dollars to their revenue. OSX is also a very high margin product.

aCe: "anyone know how this compares to Vista on a relative scale of installed user base?"

Yes, I know the relative scale: 22 percent of new Leopard owners routinely get calls from their relatives asking them how to accomplish a simple task or to fix a problem with their Vista PCs.

@Huey,

No, I don't work for MS and yes, you are right, 88 million is the number of shipped or "channel" copies of Vista. I didn't say otherwise.

my goddess what a bunch of lemmings! 2 million people just lined up and bought it over the weekend? where is Zune Tang?!?

lemmings!

.......i waited till monday.

BTW, for the record, 3 installs, all three the drive failed to show up for about 45 seconds. one fresh install, one update, one archive and install. all 3 flawless after the slow drive appearance.

my folks bought a Vista empowered PC and took it back within a week...they then "upgraded" to XP.

I think Leopard has room to grow.

@ gmac,

Well said!

Me thinks Leopard rocks.

Leopard rocks!

I'm the "mac" guy in my area, but many of my friends still call me to fix their damn PC's! It's gotten so ridiculous, that i've resorted to charging crazy amount's of beer, and they still call when I'm passed out.

This two million figure is bloated as well. In my case, I received our maintenance copy yesterday. 350 seats. No way I am implementing any time soon. Too risky to put mission critical machines in beta-test mode. Let the dust settle until 10.5.2 or 10.5.3 before even thinking about installing. Check CS 3 compatibility, etc...

So yes, I "bought" 350 copies, but no way they get installed on more than 2 or 3 machines anytime soon.

"alot" is not a word

No surprise! There were hundreds of people lined up outside the Apple store in Columbus, OH on Friday night. I was kinda shocked at the crowd lined up for a software upgrade. Personally, I prefer to wait and apply that upgrade fee toward my next new Mac.

I made my point. That's all words do.

ahahahhaha
gotta love the "sold" with quotes, for Vista

Most of those "88 Million" Vista licenses "in channel" are bundled with PCs. Those going into enterprises like mine are immediately tossed aside as we put our enterprise image of XP in its place. So, yes, we are "licensed" to use Vista, but I don't expect to see them in any but lab or test mode for the next year or so.

installed leopard on my macbook saturday with no issues. it's absolutely beautiful and i haven't run into any snags (other than an odd graphical glitch with garageband 3). go apple!

"anyone know how this compares to Vista on a relative scale of installed user base?"

Imagine an elephant's ass. Then imagine a small pimple on it. That pimple is Mac OS X Leopard.

"MS does not announce how many copies of Vista are sold, only those that are in channel [ie. "sold" to OEMs]."

Which, from Microsoft's point of view is Sold.

In the same way that when Apple ships a Mac or Mac OS X to Best Buy or an authorized reseller or a foreign distributor, or an iPhone to AT&T;they count it as Sold (Because rightly from Apple's and Microsoft's perspective, they sold it and somebody now has an obligation to pay them for it). They can't play that trick with internal stores.

Apple could have easily shipped 2 million copies out to entities which have purchased them from Apple, but it's highly unlikely that number of copies are in the hands of end users.

I'll wait until Mac OS XI (that's eleven, for everyone else).

Maybe Apple will name them over the planets.

Mac OS XI Mercury
Mac OS XI Venus
Mac OS XI Earth
Mac OS XI Mars
Mac OS XI Jupiter
Mac OS XI Saturn
Mac OS XI Uranus ( [giggles] Sorry, an oldie but a goodie)
Mac OS XI Neptune
Mac OS XI Pluto (Damn those astronomers who denied it 'planet' status. It will always be a planet, period.)

@ Brew"Mac"ster: Why didn't I think of that!

One install of Leopard down, at first got an error about being out of disk space doing and archive and install. Tried again with archive and install, and off it went. Strange. Been running Leopard since Friday night, and I love it except for two things -- no more hierarchical folders in the dock, thanks to Stacks, and getting used to that semi-opaque menu bar. Other than that, bliss. Time Machine kicks booty!

MW: Funny how the PC press still have to put in that "Windows for serious work" thing, like they're still embarrassed about using a Mac or something. If Leopard trounces Winblows so bad, why are you not using it?
Doing my sister's upgrade tonite, I expect it will be easy on her new aluminum iMac.

Microsoft's "sales" numbers for vista include every boxed copy shipped to a store and every unsold PC with vista pre-loaded that's sitting at a retailer or in OEM warehouses. Apple doesn't count the product sold until a consumer actually buys the Leopard DVD or a computer with Leopard pre-loaded. So I it's likely selling way, way better than Vista.

One thing I was trying to imply was that if the entire mac user base is around 25 million, then those 2 million copies sold in under 3 days reflects an adoption rate of approximately 8%.

So if the last quarter Vista installed user base is correct, which was over half a year since it's release, it has a user base of approximately 88 million. Working backwards then similarly an 8% adoption rate would put the entire PC user base at 1.1 billion. I'm pretty sure it isn't that high. Even if it is, it's taken a long time to reach that milestone.

Point being, yes MSFT sells more OS's. However, of the people who can actually install and utitlize a specific OS, Apple has beaten the pants off the Windows platform. The adoption rate over several months for Windows is lower than Apple's in a couple of days.

What's the downside again?

"Apple doesn't count the product sold until a consumer actually buys the Leopard DVD or a computer with Leopard pre-loaded"

That's true only for computers and DVDs sold by Apple's own stores. With any other channels when it goes out the warehouse door, it's a sale.

" if the entire mac user base is around 25 million, then those 2 million copies sold in under 3 days reflects an adoption rate of approximately 8%."

If only 5% of them have support contracts on their OS, Apple just booked 1.25 million "sales" right there.

"8% adoption rate would put the entire PC user base at 1.1 billion. I'm pretty sure it isn't that high."

You're right, it's closer to 1 billion.

Well, I bought my mom a new Macbook on Saturday, with a drop-in copy of Leopard, so she's one of the 2million. Of course, if it works well, then I'll buy a family version of it for all of my Macs.

Rob, you're right. Friday night at the Apple Store Easton in Columbus was crazy. My lady friend and I were there. The line was down the street and around the corner even with the threat of rain (it never did). Count us among the 2 million.

As for Comparison, if a leopard jumps on an elephant in the wild, that elephant will know it and he's gonna need help getting that bad boy off of him!

Peace.
Olmecmystic

P.S. Yo, MDN, what's up with emoticons on here the last couple of days? I'm clicking on them but nothing's happening. The one you see was done manually. Semi-colon, dash, right parenthese. Get on it. Thanks!

"As for Comparison, if a leopard jumps on an elephant in the wild, that elephant will know it and he's gonna need help getting that bad boy off of him!"

Actually the elephant usually casually kills the leopard and gets on with whatever he was doing before the small irritation arose.

Elephants are much more dangerous to leopards than the other way around.

Oh Yeah? Well Vista shipped...a lot.

SO THERE! Let's Dance!

—Steve Balmer

I 'd love to upgrade to Leopard from Tiger badly. However, I heard complaints in Apple 's forum that Sun people said Java in Leopard is only version 1.4 and they need 1.6 for their work. If that is true, then that information stengthen my belief that I have to wait few more months, and until Leopard upgrade its Java version to a newer one as well. Some of the softwares I use require at least Java 1.5.

Oh, BOY!
What an afternoon/evening.
Did all the good stuff then said "load that sucker". It said "Urp" and told me my HD was toast. ?HUH? Waddaya MEAN? Get out of my drive ... OUT, I say! Please? Please come out? Come ON!
So I plugged my Firewire drive back in and ... wow, I can use that for my boot disk - or toast that, too. Well, it installed there. Ran iDisk, the computer's HD was NOT toast, installed there, then killed me some WoW monsters in one Spaces window.
Almost 1AM ... think I will go to sleep, now. Tired, very tired.
Dave

I think it is amazing that Leopard, or any Mac OS X release sells as many as it does. It is so easy to just steal it yet people are WILLING to pay for it. How many M$ sufferers are willing to do so. I really feel sometimes people feel a degree of animosity toward M$ and actually would prefer to steal from them.

I know for myself, I have three installs every release, yet I always buy the family pack. I could easily buy a single user license and install it on all three. But I don't feel the need to rip off Apple, I want to pay for their products. They make it so, so easy to stay legit I feel that needs to be rewarded by buying my licenses straight and on the level.

"I know for myself, I have three installs every release, yet I always buy the family pack. "

Congratulations on the 5 copies Apple sold you and counted towards this total.

What Microsoft really doesn't want anyone to know is just how many copies of Vista are being returned in exchange for XP. Not only that, it's being released as a "downgrade" ever so quietly.