Nearly one-in-five Mac users have upgraded to OS X 10.6

Having commanded Amazon’s software top seller spot for more than a month, it’s not surprising that Apple’s Snow Leopard has doubled the sales pace set by Leopard and nearly quadrupled that logged by Panther. Now there’s a another secondhand metric showing that Mac users are migrating to OS X 10.6 at a record pace.

Net Applications has published a report showing that 0.91 percent of all the web requests measured come from computers running Snow Leopard. In terms of the online Mac community, which amounts to 4.93 percent of all traffic, 18 percent of users tracked by the metrics company are running Apple’s latest operating system.

This data tracks well with initial sales figures collected by NPD that showed sales of Snow Leopard in the first few weeks doubled those of Leopard, while more than tripling Panther’s sales. Moreover, week one to week 2 OS X 10.6 sales slipped less — about 25 percent — than both of its predecessors, which slid by more than 60 percent.

“With pricing reduced by more than $100 for both the single-user and five-user pack versus Leopard pricing, Apple has clearly demonstrated that aggressive pricing policies in this economic environment generate an outstanding consumer response,” said Stephen Baker, vice president, industry analysis, NPD.

Here’s the beef

Of course, this Intel Mac only OS sheds PPC code for optimized performance and a smaller install footprint. And, although the full import is yet to be seen, the addition of 64-bit memory addressing, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL are all long tail technologies that developers need to build into their applications.

So, whereas there are some who disparagingly call Snow Leopard a glorified “service pack,” nearly one-in-five users have migrated to this new OS both because of what it offers today and the longer six to 12 month potential it brings to the table…

What’s your take?

See also:
— Snow Leopard up to 10 percent more energy efficient than Leopard
— Snow Leopard has integrated anti-trojan horse feature

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• Apple’s $29 Snow Leopard DVD is the full meal deal
• Snow Leopard doubles prior record sales