I Am Leopard! Hear Me Roar!
It was recently announced that Mac OS X Leopard has sold 2 million copies in the first weekend of its release. That’s just for the boxed copies and probably doesn’t include copies that come pre-installed on new Macs. 2 million is quite a bit. I’d say that’s a pretty darn good start for a new OS.
For comparisons sake, I tried to find out just how many boxed copies of Vista were sold in the first weekend of its release but could only find a post on ZDNet where Microsoft claims to have sold 20 million copies in the first month of Vista’s release. However, the problem is that the 20 million includes Vista licenses preloaded on new PCs, upgrades, copies sold through the Vista Express Upgrade program and full packaged product sold at retail between January 30 and February 28. Great…that doesn’t really tell me how many people actually went out and bought a copy of Vista within the first weekend of its release to take home and install on their existing PC. Could be half a million, a million, 2 million…who the hell knows!
One thing is for sure though…excitement for Leopard within the first weekend of its release seems to exceed the level of enthusiasm for Windows Vista when it was first released…and the numbers prove it.
Now, with any OS release there are likely be pundits who will try and knock it down a few pegs. There’s one report about a flaw in the Leopard firewall. And, as the Macalope pointed out, there are others who claim that lots of stuff gets broken with the upgrade and that you shouldn’t upgrade. Not only that but that Apple supposedly rushed Leopard out the door.
Look, Leopard is not perfect. Neither was Tiger or any of the other prior Mac OS releases. By comparison though, Leopard is a far more solid release than Windows Vista. Vista was riddled with driver issues and software incompatibilities galore. Six months later and Vista still have the same issues which in turn has caused many individuals and companies to reconsider upgrading to Vista or purchasing computers with Vista preinstalled. The same simply can not be said about Leopard.
There are things about Leopard that bug me…but when compared to Vista I think Leopard is a far better OS. I upgraded to Leopard the very day it came out and had only two software applications that gave me problems. Out of the some odd 30 applications I usually install that’s pretty damn good if you ask me. And the two apps that gave me problems were pretty minor: Plaxo and Growl. I can do without Growl for the time being and Plaxo still works even though it has a quirk or two. Aside from that, Leopard has been the smoothest upgrade of any OS I’ve ever used. Couldn’t be happier!
