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OS X Mountain Lion Downloaded 3 Million Times in Four Days

ryuok said:
Windows 8 can do that too.

(in 4 years);)
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4 years is generous. I doubt Windows 8 will be able to hold a candle to ML.

Why Windows 8 Might Fail
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389437,00.asp

"It explains why Microsoft cannot really innovate. It's like a blind painter."

Microsoft Reinvents the Wheel with Windows 8
http://articles.marketwatch.com/201..._1_windows-phone-windows-vista-desktop-screen

"Windows 8 looks to me to be an unmitigated disaster that could decidedly hurt the company and its future. [...] No business will tolerate this software, let me assure you. As a productivity tool, it is unusable."
 
Winni said:
The Windows 8 Release Preview already has a larger user base than that... Just get over it.

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Windows 8 will cost 15 bucks for people who have been buying computers with Win 7 in the last few months and it will cost less than 40 bucks for everybody else. But unlike Mountain Lion, it is not just a service pack but a major upgrade.
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Just curious, but what "major" upgrades have been put into Windows 8 besides that ugly UI? I live with 4 PC users and all of them have said they wont be upgrading to Windows 8 just because of that start menu interface.
 
wickedking94 said:
And heres how I look at it:

Vista was pretty bad. Even with service packs it was still glitchy and didn't make very good use of hardware.

Lion also wasn't as good as we expected, but Vista was a 150$ upgrade, Lion was 30$. Vista had 6 years of development, Lion had 2.

Now we move on to the "fix" OS's. I'll admit Windows 7 is a massive improvement over vista. Its faster and much more stable. But again its a 150$ upgrade, and what user-end features did it add? The only visible change i noticed was a slight change to the taskbar. With Mountain Lion, all or most of lions problems have been fixed on an INITIAL release, with few or no bugs of its own. And unlike 7, its a mere 20$ and provides many new user-end features as well as a minor visual upgrade (the dock). I can easily afford a 20$ upgrade and got it the day it came out. My mother on the other hand spend months deciding if windows 7 would be worth it.

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Okay, but still the price has got to drop. I can easily spend 20$ on an OS upgrade but i would have to find serious justification to spend 150$ on an upgrade.
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Agreed. If the come in with a good price (low $20s) then people would be more likely to upgrade. But if they go higher, less people will want to spend the money.

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Winni said:
The Windows 8 Release Preview already has a larger user base than that... Just get over it.

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Windows 8 will cost 15 bucks for people who have been buying computers with Win 7 in the last few months and it will cost less than 40 bucks for everybody else. But unlike Mountain Lion, it is not just a service pack but a major upgrade.
Click to expand...

Really...$40 bucks....

I hope it is lower.
 
10/10 would download again!

Mountain Lion has made my Late 2008 MacBook feel brand new again! It's much faster and smoother! Also, it has also improved battery life which is always a positive! So happy with Mountain Lion. Haven't had any issues with it whatsoever *touch wood*!
 
How many of those downloads were failed installs that required users to get another activation code to re-download? From what I've seen/read, it couldn't have been a small amount.
 
KnightWRX said:
It wouldn't surprise me that Windows 8 adoption numbers in absolute units will be higher than 3 million in 4 days, why people want to deny that I'm not sure. It would be interesting to get the numbers as percentages of the installed based though.
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Apple has to boast about the fast adoption rate because they cannot boast about the market share or user base. OS X plays in a tiny niche of the IT industry. In a month, nobody will buy Mountain Lion anymore because by then the market is already saturated.

Windows 7, on the other hand, still has not reached 50% market share after all that time, but according to Microsoft we are talking about more than 650 million sold Win7 licenses here, with an estimated total PC base of 1.2 billion systems (of which XP still has around 43% market share). Microsoft is a corporate player, they are used to slow adoption rates of their new software. But it's the size of the user base that makes all the difference.

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linux2mac said:
4 years is generous. I doubt Windows 8 will be able to hold a candle to ML.

Why Windows 8 Might Fail
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389437,00.asp

"It explains why Microsoft cannot really innovate. It's like a blind painter."

Microsoft Reinvents the Wheel with Windows 8
http://articles.marketwatch.com/201..._1_windows-phone-windows-vista-desktop-screen

"Windows 8 looks to me to be an unmitigated disaster that could decidedly hurt the company and its future. [...] No business will tolerate this software, let me assure you. As a productivity tool, it is unusable."
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Yeah, sure. Let's talk about this in a year from now when hundreds of millions of NEW PCs and tablets have been shipped with Windows 8 pre-installed and the first early development releases of Windows 9 have surfaced.

People have been bitching about Microsoft since the release of DOS 1.0. It hasn't stopped them from becoming the most powerful software company on the planet. And unlike Apple, they still care for professional users.
 
DougB541 said:
yeahh...if a non-marketed, non final software consumer preview did 1 million in one day...i'm sure full retail version will do more than 4 million.
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I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from the consumer preview. These are the early adopters. Because Windows has an enormous base, there are a large number of people who are not developers, but are into the technology. They are not representative of the overall Windows base, which is far more conservative.
 
By comparison, Apple announced one million downloads of OS X Lion (10.7) in the first day of its launch.
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That's not a comparison. We don't know how many Lions were sold in four days and we don't know how many Mountain Lions were sold in the first day. Furthermore, if Lion had stayed at the same rate (1M in 1st day) it would have outdone ML with 4M in 4 days.
 
AidenShaw said:
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

- less than half of Apple OSX users are running 10.7 or 10.8
- Windows 8 share is 6 times larger than 10.8
- Vista share is equal to the total Apple OSX share
- Windows 7 has almost caught up with XP, and should shortly be on top

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These figures include new systems, don't they? Obviously there are many more new Windows systems sold than Macs. So, if so, this chart wouldn't really be relevant to the current discussion, which is about upgrades.

Additionally, if the figures are accurate, they do not include the 3M downloads of 10.8. The share of 10.8 provided here is .03%; if this were 3M, that would imply 10 Billion desktops in the world, which seems quite a bit high. So I suspect this data is at least a few days behind, and the 10.8/W8 numbers are developers. So, is it plausible that there are 6 times as many Windows developers as Mac developers? It seems reasonable.
 
Last edited:
I'm one of the 3 million. I love OS X Mountain Lion so far. Can't wait for the Facebook notification feature!
 
Everyone only has one way and 1 store to update a MAC now - downloads will have to be up at the APP store, there is no other way to get it worldwide.

Apple moved 4million computers last quarter - out of 87.5million.

even if nobody updates to windows 8 it will leave OSX behind, be glad for Apple but really the Windows Vs PC thing is over.
 
Gasu E. said:
These figures include new systems, don't they? Obviously there are many more new Windows systems sold than Macs. So, if so, this chart wouldn't really be relevant to the current discussion, which is about upgrades.
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Apple is giving away the upgrade to new MAC buyers since Jun - you can not assume all those downloads are people buying an Upgrade.
 
Of course they upgraded...

Lion was so damn buggy, although a lot of Safari bugs carry over. These memory management problems made Lion unusable for me in 8GB. I'll never know, however, if Mountain Lion fixes the problem because I upgraded to 16GB in order to make my computer usable. I can only assume that Mountain Lion is faster, but I can't really tell.
 
macnerd93 said:
Apple users on the other hand actually get excited about a new OS update and are generally wanting to be one of the first to get it ASAP.
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Us crazy power users have been using Windows 8 since it was available to the public. Even earlier for developers.

Ars had a great review for Mountain Lion. I never touched Lion beyond a few days.
 
Fixed:

APPLE said:
Apple has announced that OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) downloads have exceeded three million in four days, "making it the most successful [app bundle] release in Apple's history".
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These are not OS level changes. The last major addition that made me proud to own a Mac was Grand Central Dispatch and the technologies that worked with it in Snow Leopard. Maybe that was such a huge leap forward that Apple feels it can now push app bundles & superfluous skeuomorphism.
 
mwhities said:
Had Apple sold it as 150, I bet they'd still sold as many or close to it. I would've for sure.
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150$? I don't think so. This was a tiny update. the 20$ price is justified. I know for sure I wouldn't have downloaded it on my devices had it been 40$+
 
i was download mountain lion after once time pause and shut down when i want resume to download i cant .. restart and try it .. just show download no resume ..!!
tath mean is i shoud re download !! ..
help me plzz .. i download 3gb ..
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KdParker said:
Agreed. If the come in with a good price (low $20s) then people would be more likely to upgrade. But if they go higher, less people will want to spend the money.

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Really...$40 bucks....

I hope it is lower.
Click to expand...

i was download mountain lion after once time pause and shut down when i want resume to download i cant .. restart and try it .. just show download no resume ..!!
tath mean is i shoud re download !! ..
 
nuckinfutz said:
Really? Did you imagine anything? Saying something is underwhelming™ doesn't take much imagination at all considering you've not mentioned any substantive features that are missing.
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What about RSS removed from Safari? An incredibly useful feature pointlessly ripped out of the browser for no reason and without warning (unless you are a developer).

Plus there are further small movements towards the kind of world we can expect with further iterations of OS X - it is still a choice that you can install apps that aren't from the app store, but it is set to a default that only app store apps can be installed. Expect that facility to be turned off at some point, then the walled garden will become a prison.
 
Crzyrio said:
You are missing the point he is trying to make. No doubt Windows will sell more than OS X. He is saying that no way will Windows sell 3 Million copies in 4 Days.
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No, I'm not missing the point, I'm saying he's likely to be wrong purely based on unit sales.

Look, let me put some maths on this. In the previous quarter 87.5 million PC's were sold worldwide. Take out the Macs and you can work on somewhere around 83 million PC's almost all of which are running Windows. Let's round up and say there's 92 days in a quarter, that gives you 0.9022 million PC sales a day. So even in the last quarter with no new OS MS likely sold an average of more than 3 million copies in 4 days.

Now on top of that you have the extra / pent-up demand for new hardware any new OS generates, plus sales of Windows RT devices AND upgrade purchases. On top of that any PC purchased between June 2nd and January 31st is eligible for a Windows 8 upgrade for £15 (£1 more than Mountain Lion). Plus it's a back to school quarter just before hand so there may be a LOT of upgrades being done.

Does anyone, faced with that reality, think that Microsoft won't manage to sell similar or, more likely, greater numbers?

This isn't a bash or anything else against Apple, 3 million sales in 4 days is really good going. But come on folks, let's get a little perspective here...
 
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