Submitted by During the first two weeks of its release, Snow Leopard outsold Apple’s two previous operating systems by a wide margin and set a record for the Mac maker. Sales of Apple’s latest OS were more than two times higher than its predecessor, Leopard, and almost four times more than Leopard’s predecessor, Tiger, according to the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales, excluding online sales.
Being that OS X 10.6 is priced at $30.00 and frees 20GB of disk space, as well performance increases, and some minor UI fixes it is a good deal. Also I have had very few problems with 10.6 compared to upgrading to 10.5. It is just a good value for what you get.
Actually, SL only frees about 6 GB of data compared to Leopard but at the same time Apple changed disk capacity unit in Finder from GiB to GB which is why the harddisk miraculously gains a few extra GB storage.
I got about 14Gb back. I have an older iMac (2007 white model) with a 250Gb drive. I was surprised when I did the maths…
We have 3 machines at work which got similar results, one is the same vintage as mine, the other two are aluminium iMacs…
Anyway, 6Gb is nothing to sneeze at I guess, that’s around 8 AVI’s
its only $30 if you bought leopard. otherwise you must buy leopard and add up $30, so its more expensive actually.
On top of that “no new features” feels like a cheap service pack in the Windows world
In the Microsoft world, MS is getting people to pay more for Windows 7.
The only new features in Windows 7 are a cosmetic change in the task bar and some background things like multithreaded display APIs and DX11. And of course, memory and speed improvements.
It’s a lot like Snow Leopard that way.
True, MS *has* to sanitize their prices. Atleast $149 for Win7 Home Premium would feel like “worth the buy”…
On the other hand, I wonder what factor played the major role for its sales this time; probably performance improvements
According to Apple that is what you have to do. Tiger->leopard -> $30 snow leopard
Or
Tiger->$169 Snow leopard, ilife, iwork combo
But Tiger->$30 Snow Leopard works just fine.
But, yeah it is like an old school service pack. Something on the lines of XP SP 2 or NT 4 SP 4. I was sort of amazed at the time that they were free. Then again, Microsoft did charge $25 for Windows 98 Second Edition. Snow leopard is sort of like that.
Snow leopard is a cheap upgrade from Leopard, so it’s more attractive to buyers…
And the total number of mac users is much higher than it was when Tiger came out.
Prices of the MS products are ridiculously high. It’s good that at least Apple has a reasonable price scheme. Too bad that you have to buy a new machine though.
Apple has marketing genius. All the talk about “not adding new features, just perfecting what is there” then going ahead and actually adding new features AND improving performance, etc.
No, they cleverly marketed every aspect of the OS… the pretty stuff or the “no change but faster and more compatible” hype with non-technical users and allowing all the underlying changes to be blogged and noted and played with by technical users… AND throwing the word “64 bit” around all the while.
They are damn slick, they are.