Leopard Claims Half the Japanese OS Market In October

hoagiecat writes "Is Apple like all those bands who claim to be "huge in Japan"? Leopard accounted for 53 percent of boxed operating systems sold in Japan in October — even though it was only on sale for the last six days of the month. 'The software went on sale worldwide on Oct. 26 with sales kicking off at 6 p.m. local time in each country. Users in New Zealand and Australia got their hands on Leopard first, but Tokyo saw the first launch at an Apple retail store. About 200 people lined up in light rain to buy the software at Apple's store in the ritzy Ginza district of Tokyo. Lines also formed at other Apple stores across the country and at major electronics retailers, where special events were held to mark the start of sales. Combined with other sales of other operating systems including Tiger, Apple had an overall 60.7 percent share of the market in October -- that's a big jump from the 15.5 percent share it had in September, which was itself the highest share Apple had managed to get so far in 2007. '"

Comments

Re:In Japan...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pot, kettle, err... Japan has plenty of people still using their legacy 2G phones. Your main problem would be finding an Edge network, since Japan uses different standards to most other countries.

How much do you know about the Japanese mobile phone market?
Do you live in Japan?
Do you speak and/or read Japanese?
Do you have an account with a Japanese mobile phone provider?

There is no EDGE in Japan, nor is there GPRS or even GSM.

Japan has 3G (UMTS/W-CMDA), CDMA (different frequencies than North America, so most North American phones CDMA phones won't roam in Japan, and no EV-DO yet), and local systems (PDC and PHS).

Yes, the latter are pre-3G systems, but to refer to them as 2G is somewhat misleading since in the context under discussion 2G means GSM/GPRS/EDGE.

The iPhone is an GSM/GPRS/EDGE device with 850/900/1800/1900. There is no GSM/GPRS/EDGE in Japan on any band. An iPhone will not roam in Japan.

The only non-Japanese phones that will roam in Japan are 3G phones with UMTS 2100, and some CDMA phones from carriers outside of North America.

Re: Misleading headline

[megaduck]

Leopard does feature better Japanese support. This is like saying that the sun is brighter than the moon. OS X's Japanese support is nothing short of spectacular. All IMEs and alternate interface languages are included on the DVD (I can't remember if they're installed by default). Hell, it's even got an IME for Ainu. EVERYTHING is unicode, and all applications render Japanese characters correctly. Even mail. Leopard adds three different kinds of built-in Japanese dictionaries, including a pretty handy Japanese-English dictionary. As an added bonus, the fonts are legible and don't look like ass.

Personally, I need a computing environment that supports both Japanese and English seamlessly. Leopard fits the bill nicer than anything else I've ever used, including Vista (which I have to admit is pretty good).