DigitalDude said:
good for Apple.. but I'm interested in how many Macs actually sold with leopard. that would show how many new customers apple added.
or is most of the 2 million from the old customer base upgrading to leopard ?
Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. Both of them count their software sales in different ways. For Microsoft, every single copy of Windows shipped out of Redmond is a "sale". It does not matter if the copy has gone to OEMs or directly to the customer or even if it is still lying in a showroom.
With Apple, the case is different. Apple sells Mac OS X and also the machines that run Mac OS X. Also, Apple has a lot fewer partners and quite a small distribution chain compared to Microsoft. The sale of a new Mac, which has Leopard pre-installed is not counted as a sale for Leopard because Mac OS X is "free" with Macs. Furthermore, Apple only accounts for actual sales to the customer, not to their distribution partners like Best Buy, Amazon, etc.
Therefore, two million here refers to the total number of boxed retail copies of Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard sold to consumers by Apple, and only Apple, in two and a half days. Every single copy has been sold to an existing user seeking to upgrade from Tiger. The sales of new Macs are not included in this total.
"Apple shipped 2,164,000 Macintosh® computers (in the most recently concluded quarter), representing 34 percent growth over the year-ago quarter and exceeding the previous quarterly record for Mac® shipments by 400,000." Considering the release of Leopard and the upcoming christmas holiday season, the current quarter is probably going to be exponentially huge for Apple.
Hope that answers your doubts!
