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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. '"
Friends, have you considered the possibility that this is part of an elaborate Japanese plot to force us all to use their so-called "Wee".
Also, there is well documented evidence that Apple computers are not suitable for impressionable children and promote the use of dangerous and illegal "Wi-Fi" technology in our AirPorts.
Fortunately, sober and well-written articles such as these provide a cogent argument against the Macintosh cult.
Isn't David Hasselhoff also hug in Japan?
I'll tell you that I just got back from Japan a couple of weeks ago and there is a serious hunger for Apple's products. When there, every time I pulled out my iPhone to check an appointment or change a tune (or anything), I had people asking me all about it. Even in technology jaded Japan where you can watch TV on your cell phone, they are absolutely stoked about Apple's iPhone. My comment to one guy in the Apple store there when I went in to buy a cable and became a minor celebrity due to possessing an iPhone was "what's the big deal, you have the iPod touch", to which he responded, "but that is the iPhone and we don't have that yet!".
Just wait for the true subnotebook or tablet. That is going to sell huge in Japan.
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It seems there was some confusion about what kinds of devices you could install Leopard on, so these numbers may not hold up for long....
The world's only surviving livewriter.
It should be something like "half of all Japanese OS upgrades were Leopard," not "Leopard claims half the Japanese OS Market." Because seriously, there's a reason for OS X users to upgrade-- and little to none for XP users to do so. Why should this surprise anyone?
1/2 the OS market would mean that 1/2 of the machines in japan are farily new Macintoshes. Thats unheard of market penetration.
Or will it now run on whitebox PC's and i missed the announcement?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't really see what the big deal is with this. A bunch of people picked up a copy as soon as it was available. So what? It doesn't say much about the total number of Mac users in Japan.
Am I missing something or is some one trying to turn the initial surge from the release of a new version, into a long standing trend?
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.
This big jump makes sense, really. Who in their right mind would buy Tiger a month before Leopard is coming out, unless they specifically can't/wouldn't use Leopard for some reason? It's more impressive to me that they're beating out Microsoft, but I guess MS relies on the PC makers for most of its sales; it doesn't really need to specifically sell Vista when people are replacing their PCs fairly often. Macs generally last longer (or at least are kept longer) from what I hear, so it's more likely that someone will buy a boxed copy of a Mac OS upgrade than a Windows upgrade.
Without context these numbers mean little. How many copies of boxed OSs are sold in a typical month? A year? How has Windows boxed software been trending? Is it perhaps something that peaked a year or two back because everyone who needed Windows already had it installed OEM or had purchased their upgrades? And what part of the Japanese computer market is Mac, as opposed to PC?
For all we know Leopard only sold 250 copies nationwide. Or this may be a one time spike that means nothing.
Three Squirrels
It'd be notable if Apple did much worse than this.
1.) It's boxed sales. The people who upgrade via boxed sales are the ones who aren't going to wait to get new hardware to upgrade the OS. These people are likely to be the early adopters who will buy within the first week
2.) Vista has been out for a while, and the people who have upgraded via boxed sales have likely done it by now. Vista sales come from OEM distribution, not buying a shiny box at Best Buy.
3.) I would expect the numbers for November to drop substantially, as the early adopters will have their copies, and sales of boxed copies drop. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if hardware sales pick up a bit, as people find the holiday season and new OS to be a good time to take the plunge and buy a new computer.
The numbers to pay attention to are Apple's share of new sales, especially in laptops, and Apple's share of total installed base (which is harder to calculate accurately).
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Why was Tiger being sold at all, and why the hell would it cost more than Leopard?
OS-X isn't necessarily "Huge In Japan" but, it was boxed operating system sales, almost 90% of Windows users, have not bought a box of Vista/XP, why? Because of OEM licenses, when most people use Windows and most people get it from OEM licenses, who else has boxed operating systems that people want to buy? Linux is free and although a few people buy the boxed editions its mostly to fund development and such and other then OS-X, Linux and Windows there aren't any other major boxed operating systems so where else would it go?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
I suppose it's a surprise to nobody that a very small number of Operating Systems are sold shrink-wrapped.
Conspicuously absent from the article is any mention to the real numbers that make the percentages. I mean, if the real numbers turn out to be something like 800 total, of which 424 Leopards, then the "article" is just marketing. Likelihood of that, bigger than 53%.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Best spin ever.
Boxed OS sales for Windows are limited typically two groups in the US.
1. Those that build there own PCs
2. Those that must have the latest upgrade.
Maybe laptops are a HUGE percentage of PC sales in Japan. Almost nobody builds those. Then you have the must have the latest. Well they have already bought Vista when it first hit the market.
I am sure that Apple is doing well in Japan but this is all hype.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Where did all the "dont***mebro" tags go? I had a good laugh this morning at all the stories tagged as such.
Really, funniest thing that I've seen in ages.
Three Squirrels
I suspect that if you look at sales of boxed operating systems on Oct. 26 from 6 pm to 6 am Apple had a nearly 100% share. The statistic is nearly meaningless. The initial rush for Vista already took place.
And somehow a line of 200 whole people in a city of 12 million (0.00166% of the population) doesn't seem like very many. More than 200 people probably lined up in the light rain to buy the Japanese equivalent of hot dogs that night.
OS X displays beautiful Japanese text. Windows is barely legible by comparison.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
to buy a new OS every year. Everyone else is happy with either not paying for Linux or buying an MS OS once every 5 years.
The apple os is a wee bit harder to pirate. As you need to have an Apple first.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I didn't RTFA, but if they sold 53% of all OS in OCTOBER, how can they for sure claim half the OS market? Isn't that a bit irrevelant? What if the market was already saturated with windows, and alot of people just bought 50% of OSes in October?? Again I didn't RTFA.
hmm... Does it taste salty boys?
Or...maybe they are claiming half of all Mac's in Japan are running it. Hell, spin it either way...nothing ever happens here. It ALWAYS happens somewhere else where it is darn near impossible to prove.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
They turned honest Japanese into Mac-worshipping fools.
technical writing / development
I don't think it should surprise anyone that when a new upgrade comes around for OS X that every Mac user is immediately going to descend on it. Let's see how long these figures are sustained.
... I have to say "nothing to see here". A country known for its avid market for consumer electronics and similar products sees large sales of a thoroughly hyped new product in a market that really probably sees barely any activity under normal circumstances (I mean, really, how big *IS* the retail OS market?). That by itself makes a record month without any effort involved.
because you need new hardware.
so for Vista, you buy a new PC.
for leopard, well, you install it on your old mac, just like you did the last 3 major upgrades
... the Big Mac was the best selling burger with pieces of bread in US markets for the month of October.
Seriously folks, is this really considered news? The new version of MacOS X of course will outsell everyone when it comes to boxed shrink wrapped copies of the OS. Mac users are some of the most loyal upgraders willing to shell out over $100 almost annually for the latest Mac gadgets and GUI redesigns and the only way that most can have it on day one is by heading to their authorized Mac dealer to get it.
Congratulations to Apple for cornering the shrink-wrapped-and-boxed OS market segment.
Who buys "boxed operating systems" these days?
The Microsoft Fanboys would have bought a copy of Vista ages ago when it came out.
The Linux Fanboys don't bother with buying copies anymore - why should they in the age of broadband?
A fraction of the fraction of people who build their PCs from scratch buy OEM copies of Windows.
The other 90% of computer users just use whatever was installed when they bought the box.
So how come they haven't got 98.5% of "boxed operating systems"? I think they're just massaging their figures so they don't look like Stalinist dictators...
no taxation without representation!
while this tells us what BOXED OS was bought; it doesnt tell us what OS is used... or bought unboxed.
/. type who built it themself and will throw linux on it.
How many times has anyone you know bought a boxed version of windows? for me thats 0. I have only ever gotten it with a brand new computer. How many times are windows upgrades even feasibly runnable on the machine running the predecessor? 9 times out of time the person who has a machine capable of this is a
ok there are fps kiddies out there; but how many of them bother to buy a boxed windows? obv they sell but I feel like throughout my life i see a lot more people buying new osX versions where as the windows crowd says whatever...
think about it, since XP came out in 2002, whats the rush been? nothing.
osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
i dunno. but what i do know is that this is a useless statistic. we cant imply meaning to stats that they dont describe.
its like saying there were more wii's sold this year than 360's... couldnt the fact that a lot of people bought them last year be a factor?
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
"What is it, Obi wan?"
"It's as if I can hear millions of minds crying out in relief that their boot times are shorter and the viruses are no longer a threat."
"Well, yeah, but that would have been true with Linux or BSD, not just switching to MacOS Leopard."
"I see wisdom in you, young Luke."
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2 Upgrade had a market share of 7.2%. The Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2 Upgrade . That's the one that is only good for upgrading Windows 95/98. 7.2%. WTF.
MacOS just had a 'hot' new release, so you'd expect some sales. The 47% is the more mysterious number.
Few people actually buy Linux or BSDs in boxes, Microsoft has two pieces of crap (one of which has a support phase-out looming), and then there's .. what? Maybe while they say box sales, they really include OEM copies, so Vista is in there. Who else sells OSes in boxes these days? The figure probably includes something weird, like Symbian or something.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Alright... things are easy when you're big in Japan.
Circumcision is child abuse.
A friend of mine with a 3G-capable blackberry-like phone in the US (West Coast) said he ran races with his iPhone-using friend. According to him, her iPhone loaded many pages (over EDGE) more quickly than his 3G-capable phone. The explanation was that the chipset in the iPhone (among other things) was much faster than what was on his phone. (Wish I knew what kind of phone he was using, sorry.)
Anyhow, all this hand-wringing over the best features, like criticisms of 1st gen iPods, misses the point that what works in practice can't be compared to theoretical bests. The iPhone is amazing primarily because of its OS and the fact that web use of EDGE is rare.
When the telcos offer better networks (speed and coverage) hopefully successors to the iPhone 1.0 (including non-Apple competitors) will improve on what the iPhone has to offer. For now, people like you are considered "insightful" for what amounts to a wish list.
blog
http://www.phrank.com/sh/season2/204-wah.html
...
Mmmm, sushi dog
The main reason I haven't upgraded yet is that there is, at present, a significant bug in Kotoeri (the Japanese IME) for Leopard. If you type the word "hatake" (which means "field") and scroll through the list of potential kanji, and you get to the "display more" option, the entire IME freezes and is impossible to recover. The same thing happens with "hisashi", and I'm sure a number of other words as well.
.1 release.
There are videos of this floating around YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1pVOJL41x0), and I checked it out myself at the local Apple store. Total IME lock-up, and it uses up 100% of your processor time.
Other than that glaring bug, Leopard is easily the most friendly Japanese OS out there, and it now has a big-name Japanese dictonary & thesaurus, as well as J-E and E-J dictionaries built right in.
Here's hoping Apple gets their shit sorted out for the
I don't see how it's any harder to verify than if it happened in the states. This is the age of information, after all - physical location really doesn't bar you from finding this stuff out, and I don't think the government/economy here in the US is any more trustworthy than that of Japan.
Everyone in Tokyo has blazing broadband speeds... why wouldn't apple sell downloads? It seems ironic that they would sell other people's media but not their own.
Gusty Gibbon is available for free download... and Automatix is available for all your media needs.
God bless Apple... it keeps the tech-challenged off the linux forums.
osX however has released multiple new versions... if you total that up together i wonder if that reaches the bloated cost of vista?
Let's total it up in my household, and setting aside OS upgrades that came with hardware.
OS X: Three used copies of 10.2.6, to upgrade old OS 9 Macs to OS X (3 * $49). Total: $147.
Windows: Four clearance copies of Windows 2000 Professional ($79 + 3 * $29) to upgrade from Windows 95/98. Total: $136.
Looks like Windows is cheaper. Now, let's see, if I want to upgrade further...
OS X: Family pack of Leopard: Total: $199.
Vista: I can't figure out what versions I'd have to get, and Microsoft even makes it hard to find out what it costs, but I'm guessing that'll be $500 to $1000 for three desktops and one laptop.
I guess I'm sticking to Windows 2000. It's not a hard decision.
So why are we surprised that OS X ruled the market there? Japanese consumers aren't terribly fond of shitty products. You know, like Vista...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Tagged as Alphaville?
Am I not mistaken? Isn't this a reference to the 80's German Band?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
If Apple should ever get significant market share in the US, I, for one, don't welcome our shiny overlords from Cupertino. I think Apple is simply not a nice company.
Yawn, so that's like what, 100 people bought Apple's in October. Haven't we had a bunch of article float through how the desktop computer was effectively dead in Japan for 90% of the population?
This is excellent news. It is in everyone's best interest that Apple start gaining a significant chunk of the market in every country. (Not because I necessarily adore Apple so much. I mean, yes, their products are amazingly engineered, from Mac OS X with a BSD system at its core to their computer lineup to the iPods, iPhone, iTV, and their software lineup, Apple is a company where people put some serious thinking caps on and do some really wonderful work. But all this said, their products do have shortcomings. For example, X11 in Leopard is totally jacked up now.) Cupertino gaining market share is good because it creates the only "real" competition (in the desktop/laptop space) against that dark cloud from further north up the west coast that Google is a better company than (whoosh; that was a flying chair). Yes, I know that Linux and the BSDs kick the dark cloud's little fanny when it comes to servers, and even when it comes to running hundreds of corporate or government desktops that need a specific setup (which is crafted by a serious sysadmin somewhere) for a bunch of monkeys to run a few specific apps, and yes, especially in the embedded space, the free OSes kick the you-know-what out of the dark cloud's products. But none of this is doing much to get rid of the dark cloud. Apple, on the other hand, can wipe out much of that nasty stuff by getting people used to the idea that computers are actually reliable; that computers are fun again; that shoddy products should be shunned instead of purchased because "there's no other choice", etc., etc., etc. And that, ladies and gentlemen, will open up the market, use, and improvement of the zillions of Linux distros and the several BSDs by a zillion percent.
Now.. if only they would try get SMB to play nice with whatever Japanese encoding comes from Windows... (shift-jis ?)
The Japanese file names coming form my Terastation NAS are mangled even when using XP on Parallels !
"La presi e te la pagai (480.000 Lire)"
- That does not sound like much considering Leopard FINALLY came out last month? Shouldn't it be more like 3000%?
- Nope. Says right here. Half of what was sold "last month".
- Well.. It probably rained. Who's gonna go out to buy an OS in the rain?
- You are right. Says also that 200 people stood outside the Apple's store in Ginza district in Tokyo.
- Yeah man! See!? Macs RULE! People stand out in the rain waiting for it. IN THE FUCKIN' RAIN STORM, IN THE FUCKIN JAPAN! They have tsunamis there, you know?
- Says here it was "light rain".
- Whatever man! Macs are BIG in Japan!
Oh.. did I say that the title is misleading propaganda drivel?
TFA is quite impartial, but the title... Goebbels would have been proud.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The point is that as long as I have been in IT in the capacity that I have, every company seems to use Japan as their #1 for something. Veritas used to say that most of their revenue came from Japan. Several other companies I know of claimed something of theirs was #1 in Japan. My point is, when will something be #1 here?
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
I dunno. I am seeing a trend here. It's been like this for a couple of days.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software/ref=sv_sw_0/002-1240868-4470412
OK, from nearly nothing, to being 60% sales for a month, to going back to nothing, since everyone will have upgraded.
Yes, this truly IS a slashdot story....zzzzzzzzz
A newly released OS manages to outsell old ones??? SHOCKING!!!
To me this story says more about the sorry state of the "OS market" than it does about anything else.
The main idea being that there really *isn't* an OS market anymore.
MS has their OEM monopoly so they have little to no need for a market. Apple only sells to their own hardware buyers (for now) but they have no monopoly to prop them up. So their need for a market is greater, but who else is there besides them?
There isn't much point in talking about it as it's mostly a point of history now, not something that is likely to change.
I guess it's still useful for marketing purposes tho.
That statistic only means that there are as many Leopard upgraders as there are people stupid enough to *pay* to upgrade an existing machine to Vista.
I'd be curious to see sales numbers for any boxed OS.
So Microsoft will say: "More Windows sold than any other OS."
Apple says: "More OS X sold than any other boxed sales."
Linux says: "More Linux copies downloaded than any other OS."
Hah! Think big companies are the only ones who can twist statistics to their own ends?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
J. True, GSM (2.xG) and UMTS (3G) can and often are deployed in parallel, just as early GSM was deployed alongside existing AMPS and digital AMPS ("TDMA") networks. But this may not be the case in parts of Japan.
The fuss about a foreigner who speaks (reads/writes) Japanese depends on the expectations.
Guys like me who really do speak fluently not only get no fuss anymore, but we get no breaks. There's a certain level you break and you're suddenly expected to not only be able to communicate at the native level, but be steeped in the culture so that they don't need to bother explaining anything at all. One difference of opinion and suddenly you get a lot of condescension, and a shower of explanation that completely misses the point.
No reall surprise here.
So the reaction to the iPhone is going to be different from different people (No surprise there either.) If you're hanging around with Japanese MSFanBoiz, your going to get a lot of flack for even mentioning that Apple still exists, or asserting that Microsoft did not, after all, buy Apple out eight years ago, and that the Mac OS is not, after all, a re-branded (old) version of MSWindows.
?? comes out just fine.
when attempting to use more than one language on the same box.
(Not talking about the pseudo-English support in shift-JIS.)
And the stuff about UT-16 handling something better than UTF-8, if such things happen in MSWindows land, that shows how out of touch MS is.
UTF-8 and UTF-16 should be simple mappings from UTF-32, with some minor potential security holes where bad parsing could potentially map some illegal bit patterns to valid code points. It's not UTF-8 vs. UTF-16, it's bad parsing.
UTF-32 is what should be used internally. (Not in files, in the libraries.) And UTF-16 was the result of some misguided design choices when some western character gurus simply refused to understand that the n-thousand most common characters are not sufficient. (Egged on by some Japanese IT guys that at the time so worshipped the western IT industry they would have sworn computers walked on water if they heard some western IT type say it.)
It is indicative of the tendency for Mac users to keep upgrading the OS of older machines.