On August 28th, Apple released its latest operating system Snow Leopard (
) on the masses. The big news with Snow Leopard is that the focus isn’t on whizz-bang features, but on performance and stability improvements.
As such, the price-point, just $29 for a single-user upgrade license (provided you already have Leopard on your Intel Mac) made it a no-brainer for me to immediately upgrade all the Macs in my house.
According to analysts at NPD, I wasn’t alone. Sales for the first two weeks of Mac OS X Snow Leopard have far exceeded those of both Mac OS X Leopard (released in October 2007) and Mac OS X Tiger (released in April 2005). NPD reports that sales for Snow Leopard were more than two times higher than those for Leopard and almost four times higher than those of Tiger.
The initial sales weren’t limited to just the first week (when many members of the Apple Faithful rush out and buy the latest iProduct), NPD reports that second-week sales dropped only 25%. Considering that Leopard saw its sales drop 60% the second-week, the price-point and the low-key marketing campaign seem to be working.
Although the NPD report doesn’t touch on this, I wonder what role social media played in Snow Leopard sales. Because the focus is on performance, not features, Apple has had a relatively quiet ad campaign for its latest OS. Having said that, I know my Twitter (
) stream (which is admittedly full of lots of Mac users) full of conversation and links regarding Mac OS X 10.6.
So Mac users, have your upgraded to Snow Leopard? What have your experiences been so far?
I updated my iMac this week with Snow Leopard and have been very impressed. What are thoughts?
