Snow Leopard doubles prior record sales
There is no doubt any more which cat is the best leopard in the land; Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) has more than doubled the previous best by an Apple OS, set by Leopard (OS X 10.5).
All of Apple’s news was good yesterday, with record earnings being reported across virtually all lines of Apple products. It was a red-letter day for the big sellers like the iPhone, iPod, and Mac. Operating system revenue is a very small piece of the Apple income pie, but even so the doubling of the previous best operating system retail sales record, set during the release of Leopard 10.5, qualifies as a pretty big deal on the software side for Apple.
Chief Operations Officer Tim Cook, as a part of the teleconference at which Apples latest quarterly earnings were announced yesterday, said that “the upgrade sales of Snow Leopard, which we include in family and box sets, were more than double what we experienced from Leopard over the same five-week sales period. … that was much more than we planned, very pleasantly surprised.”
This is one more chapter of a book in which the star is clearly OS X. Each version of the Mac OS X operating system has set a new record upon launch, from Jaguar on up, starting in 2002. Part of this growth is based on greater hardware sales, of course, but a lot of it has been driven by customer satisfaction with the OS X product, according to an AppleInsider article. After the release of Leopard in 2007, ChangeWave Research founder Tobin Smith wrote that “It comes as no surprise that Apple sets the standard in terms of customer satisfaction, but there’s a new twist on why they’re outperforming the rest of the industry – it’s the amazing customer satisfaction rating on Apple’s new Leopard OS.”
That does not come as a big surprise to a lot of Mac users. Personally, this observer moved to the Mac lineup less than two years ago, primarily for the benefits of OS X over Windows, and has never looked back. The Mac OS is faster, more responsive, and much less trouble than is Windows. The hardware from Apple is pretty much the same stuff you get with a Windows machine. It is OS X that makes people that move to the Mac, stay with the Mac.
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