About 9 percent of the Mac OS X installed base upgraded to Mac OS X Leopard over the weekend, according to figures released by Apple and estimates supplied by financial analysts.
Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard between Friday and Sunday night, which includes sales of boxed copies, online sales, and new Macs with Leopard preinstalled. When Apple launched Tiger, it took the company 39 days to hit the 2 million mark on a much smaller installed base.
Research firm Piper Jaffray released a note on Tuesday estimating that the Mac OS X installed base is around 23 million users at the moment, as compared with the 12 million Mac users that existed in April 2005 when Tiger launched. At the 2007 Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the Mac OS X installed base was 22 million users.
In comparison, Microsoft sold 20 million copies of Windows Vista in the first month it went on sale. Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the Windows installed base would be around 1 billion users by the end of the company's 2008 fiscal year, which comes to a close next June. And as of last week, it had sold 88 million copies of Vista.
To get a sense of the current installed base of Windows PCs, you may subtract some generous projections for PC shipments over the next nine months from the 1 billion target to derive a number of around 800 million Windows users. That may not be accurate, however, since many of the PCs that will be purchased between now and next June will most likely replace older Windows PCs.
Still, people in emerging markets are buying PCs for the first time--and buying a lot of them--so the expansion of the Windows installed base does move in step with the expansion of the overall market to a certain degree. Let's split the difference and assume there are 900 million Windows users as of right now. That would be mean that almost the same percentage of Windows users have upgraded to Vista in nine months as the percentage of Mac users that upgraded to Leopard in two days.
These are different types of markets, and they have different motivations for upgrading. Almost all the Vista upgrades so far have been consumer and small business purchases, and businesses will probably start to upgrade in greater numbers next year following the release of Vista Service Pack 1 and as the PCs bought during the boom years of 2004 and 2005 begin to age.
Still, it was clear that the Mac installed base was more excited about Leopard than the Windows installed base was about Vista. It could be due to Mac users holding onto their machines for a longer period of time and prefer upgrading, while Windows users just wait until they need a new PC. Or perhaps we can allude it to Apple's marketing campaigns for its releases, while Windows customers typically wait until the first service pack comes out before upgrading.
This article was originally a blog post on News.com.
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