Bargain price boosts Apple's Snow Leopard to swift sales start

[AppleInsider]

With sales twice as high as Leopard and four times better than Tiger, Apple's new operating system, Snow Leopard, is off to a tremendous start, new sales figures show.

New figures released Thursday by NPD Market Research show that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard not only bested its two predecessors in terms of sales, but it also has showed strength beyond the initial week. While each Leopard and Tiger saw sales drop more than 60 percent following their initial launch, sales of Snow Leopard reportedly dipped only 25 percent in week two.

"Even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the releases of Leopard or Tiger, the ease of upgrading to Snow Leopard and the affordable pricing made it a win-win for Apple computer owners - thus helping to push sales to record numbers," said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.

Specific sales numbers were not provided by NPD, but the company said it is another strong launch for an Apple operating system. When Leopard debuted in 2007, the NPD heralded the Mac maker's ability to continually produce "blow-out" launches of its new software. In its first month, Leopard sold 20.5 percent better than Tiger in 2005. Similarly, Tiger was a 30 percent increase over 2003's Panther, and Panther was a 100 percent improvement over Jaguar in 2002.

NPD credited Apple's bargain pricing of $29 for Snow Leopard with the software's strong start.

"With pricing reduced by more than $100 for both the single-user and five-user pack versus Leopard pricing, Apple has clearly demonstrated that aggressive pricing policies in this economic environment generate an outstanding consumer response," Baker said. "As we head into the fall selling season, and the release of another major OS upgrade, it will be instructive to see if that upgrade - currently projected to sell at ASPs much higher than Snow Leopard - can deliver the same incremental increase in consumer demand that Snow Leopard has enjoyed."

In addition to pricing, Snow Leopard's mostly subtle, under-the-hood improvements were largely viewed as positive from the mainstream media. The new operating system brings a 64-bit architecture, built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, and streamlined and refined programs. The upgrade will have applications load faster, and free up an average of 7GB of storage on a user's hard drive. It was released Aug. 28.

Analyst Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray has predicted that Apple will sell 5 million copies of Snow Leopard during the September quarter launch window. He believes those sales will bring the Cupertino, Calif., company an additional $66 million in operating revenue during the quarter.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[Parsec]

Just goes to show, give customers a bit more speed and a few refinements to an already good OS and people are happy if the price is right.

We don't need massive new features and a new UI every OS release.

[ascii]

That's good. The more people using it, the more pressure on 3rd party devs to update their app to the latest OS.

[DKWalsh4]

I for one absolutely love SL. I have my iMac 8,1 set up to automatically boot with the 64-bit kernel and so far have not run into any problems. No incompatibility crashes or apps unable to load. My HP printer worked exactly the same after the update with no need to update my drivers.

Not to say there are no problems with the OS, I just haven't run into any

[Mario]

Originally Posted by DKWalsh4

I for one absolutely love SL. I have my iMac 8,1 set up to automatically boot with the 64-bit kernel and so far have not run into any problems. No incompatibility crashes or apps unable to load. My HP printer worked exactly the same after the update with no need to update my drivers.

Not to say there are no problems with the OS, I just haven't run into any

Do you have any issues with choppy animations with the 64 bit kernel. If I boot SL with 32 bit kernel on my Mac Pro, all animations are butter smooth. If I switch to 64 bit kernel some animations are somewhat choppy, but dashboard is totally choppy. It's as if it has 6-7 frames per second instead of usual 60.

[aplnub]

Originally Posted by DKWalsh4

I for one absolutely love SL. I have my iMac 8,1 set up to automatically boot with the 64-bit kernel and so far have not run into any problems. No incompatibility crashes or apps unable to load. My HP printer worked exactly the same after the update with no need to update my drivers.

Not to say there are no problems with the OS, I just haven't run into any

I'm with ya and am loving how everything went very smooth.

I was surprised by Fijitsu not having their ScanSnap ready for the update and it is crippled until they get the fix out (including OCR). My Canon IPF755 large format printer doesn't get updated drivers until Oct. 17th.

[DKWalsh4]

Originally Posted by Mario

Do you have any issues with choppy animations with the 64 bit kernel. If I boot SL with 32 bit kernel on my Mac Pro, all animations are butter smooth. If I switch to 64 bit kernel some animations are somewhat choppy, but dashboard is totally choppy. It's as if it has 6-7 frames per second instead of usual 60.

None whatsoever. I wonder what could be causing this, especially on a Mac Pro???

Originally Posted by aplnub

I'm with ya and am loving how everything went very smooth.

I was surprised by Fijitsu not having their ScanSnap ready for the update and it is crippled until they get the fix out (including OCR). My Canon IPF755 large format printer doesn't get updated drivers until Oct. 17th.

I couldn't stand using the standard HP scanning program so I got VueScan. It's updated regularly and have had no issues with it on SL. (This is important because I keep paperless records so I scan everything in.)

[columbus]

Obviously the box didn't put too many off then.

[georgetang]

I've been using it and notice actually is worst than Leopard....

The Expose is not as nice as before, the Stack icon are huge, Safari is taking much more resource than before, and everything flickers more often

The HDD is non-stop spinning, my MBP 15" Unibody with 4GB RAM feels like 1GB RAM after upgrading to SL...

I spend most of the time waiting, because of the whole system freeze, mostly Safari, I've notice it takes about 1GB RAM of Real Memory, what's with that?

I'll find a way to downgrade back to Leopard

My final thoughts SL is not up to the par as Leopard, being an upgrade of an existing OS, feels cheap, no wonder they are just asking for 29.00

[teckstud]

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!
Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.
WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

[MacTripper]

Originally Posted by Parsec

Just goes to show, give customers a bit more speed and a few refinements to an already good OS and people are happy if the price is right.

We don't need massive new features and a new UI every OS release.

Exactly. We need some stabilization now after the mad rush of change from OS 9.


<begin rant>

In fact I would appreciate it if Apple goes back to free OS upgrades, because OS X is nearly perfected as it is already and Apple needs to think about rewarding it's customers for buying their pricier hardware in these tough economic times, instead of milking them for every little thing.

<end rant>

[NasserAE]

Originally Posted by georgetang

I've been using it and notice actually is worst than Leopard....

The Expose is not as nice as before, the Stack icon are huge, Safari is taking much more resource than before, and everything flickers more often

The HDD is non-stop spinning, my MBP 15" Unibody with 4GB RAM feels like 1GB RAM after upgrading to SL...

I spend most of the time waiting, because of the whole system freeze, mostly Safari, I've notice it takes about 1GB RAM of Real Memory, what's with that?

I'll find a way to downgrade back to Leopard

My final thoughts SL is not up to the par as Leopard, being an upgrade of an existing OS, feels cheap, no wonder they are just asking for 29.00

My current 15" Unibody MacBook Pro SL upgrade was carried from Leopard upgrade, which was carried from white iMac Tiger. Two OS upgrades from two computers with no single file lost and no issues whatsoever. You MBP is still under warranty so I suggest you take it to Apple for diagnosis. Complaining about it won't get you anywhere.

[Logisticaldron]

Originally Posted by Parsec

Just goes to show, give customers a bit more speed and a few refinements to an already good OS and people are happy if the price is right.

We don't need massive new features and a new UI every OS release.

I agree with everything you stated, but I wonder if the percentage of viable Mac users buying SL may actually be lower than with Leopard. Meaning, if the sales are double but the installed base that is eligible for the update is 4x the size then we have a smaller percentage buying the update despite its reduced cost. Now I'd wager that Apple will take in less revenue for SL than Leopard but we don't know the R&D costs so we don't know if they won't actually make more money from SL retail sales.

Originally Posted by georgetang

I've been using it and notice actually is worst than Leopard....

The Expose is not as nice as before, the Stack icon are huge, Safari is taking much more resource than before, and everything flickers more often

The HDD is non-stop spinning, my MBP 15" Unibody with 4GB RAM feels like 1GB RAM after upgrading to SL...

I spend most of the time waiting, because of the whole system freeze, mostly Safari, I've notice it takes about 1GB RAM of Real Memory, what's with that?

I'll find a way to downgrade back to Leopard

My final thoughts SL is not up to the par as Leopard, being an upgrade of an existing OS, feels cheap, no wonder they are just asking for 29.00

Put in your disk and do and archieve and restore, but it sounds like you are just bellyaching over any change whatsoever so I wonder why you even updated to begin with. The changes in Exposé were needed and and the app is profoundly better now. To each their own, but I think you are just complaining for the sake of complaining.

[MacTripper]

Originally Posted by georgetang

I've been using it and notice actually is worst than Leopard....

The Expose is not as nice as before, the Stack icon are huge, Safari is taking much more resource than before, and everything flickers more often

The HDD is non-stop spinning, my MBP 15" Unibody with 4GB RAM feels like 1GB RAM after upgrading to SL...

I spend most of the time waiting, because of the whole system freeze, mostly Safari, I've notice it takes about 1GB RAM of Real Memory, what's with that?

I'll find a way to downgrade back to Leopard

My final thoughts SL is not up to the par as Leopard, being an upgrade of an existing OS, feels cheap, no wonder they are just asking for 29.00

Yea sounds like a bad upgrade or other issue.

My advice is to backup files (copy Documents, Music etc to another drive/disk and check them). Better yet is to clone the whole drive to another using Carbon Copy Cloner.

You'll need to have the original sources and passwords/key codes of your applications as they will be gone if you go further as well. They will have to be reinstalled.


Now hold c and boot from the Leopard install disk and use Disk Utility to Erase with ZERO option your boot drive. (warning: everything will be gone and leave you with a blank drive). This will take a hour or so and marks off the bad sectors on your drive, which could be causing your problems. (don't bang your computer around)

After that's done, then install Leopard and use the same name/passwords as before. (Don't use Filevault as this slows down the computer drastically, unless you really need it)

After you installed Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard. Then copy and replace the Documents, Music etc. folders from backup to the boot drive in your same name user.

You should get a near, highly optimized and cleaned up drive this way. Although a Snow Leopard fresh install would be better than a upgrade.



If you cloned your Leopard boot drive before installing Snow Leopard, it would have been really easy to downgrade. Just a simple option boot from the clone and a reverse clone and a hour it would have been done automagically.

Also if your boot drive is nearly full, this will slow down the computer regardless, keep it below 50% filled for the best performance as it degrades the more it's filled beyond 50% capacity.

[Booga]

Originally Posted by teckstud

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!
Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.
WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

1. Usually Rosetta is just needed for the installer package. A lot of companies don't upgrade their build/packaging/distribution system often enough. It shouldn't have any affect whatsoever (save some extra disk space used up) if you don't run PPC code.
2. Apple has been sending Snow Leopard preview releases to paid developers for a long time. I don't think you can blame Apple here... complain to your vendor.

[macosxp]

Originally Posted by teckstud

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!
Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.
WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

Rosetta will not slow down Snow Leopard. I have no idea why it wasn't a default install, other than maybe pressuring developers to focus on Intel now. Apple has also pushed some driver updates, so who knows, maybe those'll work without rosetta.

[PaulMJohnson]

I've been happy with SL so far, but the one thing I have noticed is that Safari doesn't seem to have the benefits advertised. I thought it was going to be less prone to crashing, but I've still had it go down a few times.

On the topic of the article though, I'm really pleased takeup has been high. I'm looking forwards to seeing third party applications take advantage of Grand Central, and it seems more likely that will happen with a large installed base.

[tundraboy]

I hope the revenue uptake on 10.6 outstrips those of the previous full-price upgrades so that Apple will just charge the same $30 upgrade prices from now on.

[steveH]

Originally Posted by teckstud

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!

Suck it up, Ace.

Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.

No, it will only run when you're running PPC code, which the printer driver seems to be. Otherwise, Rosetta has no perceptible effect.

WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

Even the printer makers will take time to update their ancient, creaking print drivers.
It's not like they couldn't see that PPC support would be going away, and not in some dim misty far future.

[teckstud]

Originally Posted by Booga

1. Usually Rosetta is just needed for the installer package. A lot of companies don't upgrade their build/packaging/distribution system often enough. It shouldn't have any affect whatsoever (save some extra disk space used up) if you don't run PPC code.
2. Apple has been sending Snow Leopard preview releases to paid developers for a long time. I don't think you can blame Apple here... complain to your vendor.

Actually I do blame Epson - they probably figured that if the printer is no longer produced and they make it difficult then many will buy a new one rather be hassled.
However I wished Apple could have included a warning when installing SL that the driver I use is not compatible or published a list before they released Leopard of what was not gonna be available.
Oh well I will be forced to play with Rosetta this weekend I guess.

[JupiterOne]

Same thing with my Lexmark printer. I bought a Z1420 wireless networked printer brand new when Leopard was available. From day one, the printer drivers NEVER worked wirelessly with my MBP. It was always "Unable to communicate with printer." Printing from XP on the same network was no problem. Finally a couple of months ago, Lexmark updated their driver and it worked! Then last week I upgraded to Snow Leopard and the "1400 series" printer driver doesn't work again. But now it is some other error.

Luckily my HP Deskjet has worked perfectly.

[mstone]

Originally Posted by teckstud

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!
Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.
WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

For some reason R800 seems to be the only Epson Stylus Photo printer NOT compatible with Snow Leopard. Why I don't know. Fortunately my R2400 is ok.

http://www.epson.com.ph/support/snowleopard.shtml

[jb85]

I am really happy I upgraded to SL. But lately, every now and then, I get the spin ing beach ball when I'm using safari. I was just curious if there is a problem or if my hard drive it getting full would be the issue. Out of 160gigs I only have 31 left. I have a new 13" unibody MacBook pro. If anyone has insight it would be appreciated.

[AppleBiter]

Originally Posted by Mario

Do you have any issues with choppy animations with the 64 bit kernel. If I boot SL with 32 bit kernel on my Mac Pro, all animations are butter smooth. If I switch to 64 bit kernel some animations are somewhat choppy, but dashboard is totally choppy. It's as if it has 6-7 frames per second instead of usual 60.

How do you opt to boot with either the 64-bit kernel or the 32-bit kernel. Is there a selection somewhere that I need to make?

[Ireland]

Originally Posted by jb85

I am really happy I upgraded to SL. But lately, every now and then, I get the spin ing beach ball when I'm using safari. I was just curious if there is a problem or if my hard drive it getting full would be the issue. Out of 160gigs I only have 31 left. I have a new 13" unibody MacBook pro. If anyone has insight it would be appreciated.

No, wait for a SF update. That's the issue.

[Mario]

Originally Posted by AppleBiter

How do you opt to boot with either the 64-bit kernel or the 32-bit kernel. Is there a selection somewhere that I need to make?

Quick way to do it is to hold 64 while booting (before the spinner on gray screen with apple logo) to select 64 kernel.

If everything works for you, then you can make this permanent by editing the boot.plist file and adding x86_64 to kernel startup arguments.

[NasserAE]

Originally Posted by Mario

Quick way to do it is to hold 64 while booting (before the spinner on gray screen with apple logo) to select 64 kernel.

If everything works for you, then you can make this permanent by editing the boot.plist file and adding x86_64 to kernel startup arguments.

If you use Parallels then you will have to use the 32-bit kernel. I tried it with the 64-bit and didn't work.

[hillstones]

Originally Posted by georgetang

I've been using it and notice actually is worst than Leopard....

The Expose is not as nice as before, the Stack icon are huge, Safari is taking much more resource than before, and everything flickers more often

The HDD is non-stop spinning, my MBP 15" Unibody with 4GB RAM feels like 1GB RAM after upgrading to SL...

I spend most of the time waiting, because of the whole system freeze, mostly Safari, I've notice it takes about 1GB RAM of Real Memory, what's with that?

I'll find a way to downgrade back to Leopard

My final thoughts SL is not up to the par as Leopard, being an upgrade of an existing OS, feels cheap, no wonder they are just asking for 29.00

You have other problems with your Mac. Perhaps you have system hacks or old PowerPC programs running in the background. Try a fresh install of the OS.

Snow Leopard is considerably faster than Leopard in most respects. The only bug I have encountered is with Image Capture and its inability to transfer movie files from my digital still camera. I have none of the problems are you experiencing. If you have system freezes with Safari, get rid of those hack plug-ins. They are always incompatible with system updates.

[hillstones]

Originally Posted by teckstud

I can't print with my Epson Photo R800 and it says I need to install Rosetta and then install the driver- Waghh!
Will Rosetta slow down SL to where Leopard was? If so I may need to buy a new printer. My Photo R800 is too good to discard.
WHy has Apple messed up so many previously existing print drivers that were in Leopard? COuldn't they have sent out word long before relasing SL?

Teckstud, I thought you were you supposed to be some kind of genius? I guess you never bothered to search for the obvious??? Use the Epson drivers that are included on the Snow Leopard DVD, or download the Snow Leopard compatible driver for your printer, directly from Epson...first one in the list and released BEFORE Snow Leopard hit store shelves.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/s...form=Macintosh

Apple did not mess up any printer drivers. People are not following the directions for their specific printer. You do realize that Snow Leopard has been in development for years and printer manufacturers do have Snow Leopard drivers. You need to ditch your outdated PowerPC driver and install the correct driver. Apple doesn't write any printer software, blame the printer vendor. But in your case, you haven't bothered to install the Snow Leopard driver to correct your problem.

[hillstones]

Originally Posted by PaulMJohnson

I've been happy with SL so far, but the one thing I have noticed is that Safari doesn't seem to have the benefits advertised. I thought it was going to be less prone to crashing, but I've still had it go down a few times.

Get rid of your Safari hacks. Safari has never crashed on me.

[theAppleGuru]

Originally Posted by Parsec

Just goes to show, give customers a bit more speed and a few refinements to an already good OS and people are happy if the price is right.

We don't need massive new features and a new UI every OS release.

yes thats the point, but they refinements are not few .. atleast giving full 64bit compatibility is not just any other refinement

[jowie74]

If Apple keep up this pricing model I will keep buying. I'm surprised companies don't realise more often that people don't like paying a lot in one big go. If they sell little cheap and often then people buy more. If they created a MobileMe Premium service for say £10/$15 per month which included free OS upgrades, I'd definitely sign up.

On a slightly different note, my battery life under SL has unfortunately decreased dramatically :-(

[JupiterOne]

Originally Posted by PaulMJohnson

I've been happy with SL so far, but the one thing I have noticed is that Safari doesn't seem to have the benefits advertised. I thought it was going to be less prone to crashing, but I've still had it go down a few times.

On the topic of the article though, I'm really pleased takeup has been high. I'm looking forwards to seeing third party applications take advantage of Grand Central, and it seems more likely that will happen with a large installed base.

Originally Posted by hillstones

Get rid of your Safari hacks. Safari has never crashed on me.

I have no Safari hacks. I have a totally clean install. Just yesterday, Safari crashed saying it was due to a Flash plug-in (I don't remember the exact message). But I thought I heard somewhere that when a plug-in crashes, Safari wouldn't be affected, just the plug-in.

[teckstud]

Originally Posted by hillstones

Teckstud, I thought you were you supposed to be some kind of genius? I guess you never bothered to search for the obvious??? Use the Epson drivers that are included on the Snow Leopard DVD, or download the Snow Leopard compatible driver for your printer, directly from Epson...first one in the list and released BEFORE Snow Leopard hit store shelves.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/s...form=Macintosh

Apple did not mess up any printer drivers. People are not following the directions for their specific printer. You do realize that Snow Leopard has been in development for years and printer manufacturers do have Snow Leopard drivers. You need to ditch your outdated PowerPC driver and install the correct driver. Apple doesn't write any printer software, blame the printer vendor. But in your case, you haven't bothered to install the Snow Leopard driver to correct your problem.

Hillstones- thanks for this link. It's weird that Epson hasn't listed this on their main driver page list nor did Apple include it in 10.6.1. I will try it tonight.

[teckstud]

Originally Posted by hillstones

Teckstud, I thought you were you supposed to be some kind of genius? I guess you never bothered to search for the obvious??? Use the Epson drivers that are included on the Snow Leopard DVD, or download the Snow Leopard compatible driver for your printer, directly from Epson...first one in the list and released BEFORE Snow Leopard hit store shelves.

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/s...form=Macintosh

Apple did not mess up any printer drivers. People are not following the directions for their specific printer. You do realize that Snow Leopard has been in development for years and printer manufacturers do have Snow Leopard drivers. You need to ditch your outdated PowerPC driver and install the correct driver. Apple doesn't write any printer software, blame the printer vendor. But in your case, you haven't bothered to install the Snow Leopard driver to correct your problem.

No genius here. Now do you know how to get Flip4Mac to work in SL?