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Mac OS X Mountain Lion Gets Three Million Downloads In 4 Days
hypnosec writes "Apple has announced that its latest Mac OS X version, Mountain Lion, has had three million downloads in just four days thereby making it the most successful OS in Cupertino's history. Philip Schiller, iPhone maker's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said, 'Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever.'"
"Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever."
or?
We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Not seen a reason to upgrade myself. What feature is it that people are after?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.
Haterade Addicts get Another Opportunity to Bitch About Apple!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
All Apple users are fanboys/girls. You just become one after having used such marvellously perfect hardware and software for a while. Face it: there is nothing better!
-- Cheers!
We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)
Ah, yes. Going forward, I propose that we call this the "Windows Vista Hangover effect."
Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade? From my usage, Mountain Lion doesn't offer any real drastic changes, just some polish and some optional features, some of which are welcome, some which I'll probably never use. I haven't run into any showstopper bugs, and it's generally just a run-of-the mill upgrade with some nice features. Apple always claims they've added hundreds of new features, but their threshold for a "feature" seems to be lower and lower with each release, with even the lowliest check box being counted as a "feature" right next to full applications like iMessage or Reminders or Gatekeeper. When you separate the features by magnitude, there are only really a handful that stand out. I know every release of OSX is a "point" release, but Mountain Lion really captures the meaning behind the phrase.
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Yes, and everyone who bought mac in the last few months had it ship with lion, but was entitled to upgrade and download mountain lion for FREE.
The average Sales Man often gets the title of VP of sales. Because they need to work with the other companies higher ups, having a VP in their title makes them seem important, not just a normal sales guy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I don't know about the 2999999 other sheep, but i will be upgrading my laptop from snow leopard to mountain lion indeed. I liked some features in Lion, but they sounded like they needed improvement. Mountain Lion may be it.
Also, it's cheap.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Where I work people can enter their own job titles on the internal 'phone book' on the intranet.
As you can imagine everyone is senior this, senior that etc ... except for one of the sysadmins in India who is the 'Most Senior Systems Administrator'
Hard to claim?
Click on link on Apple homepage. Fill in contact info and serial number (Apple Menu->About This Mac.... copy/paste). Click submit.
A day or two later, get an email with a redemption code for the App store.
Input redemption code, click install.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Actually, Waterworld-reference works exceedingly well for bringing about his point. Waterworld a lot of money in the beginning, but eventually failed to satisfy expectations.
I thought we all agreed that a desktop OS was a terrible idea on a tablet. OSX doesn't even have the touch amenities that Windows 7 does.
Can't agree more. /. is becoming a joke as a 'news for nerds' site. They turn into the trollfest we see above. Every single post above is flamebait.
The fact that OS X broke out of the marginal OS arena is good news for any non-windows platform, regardless of who makes it. It's also of interest to the enterprise crowd looking for alternatives to Windows 8, and not only due to the fact that this happens to be OS X but also because they may look at other alternatives if Windows grip on the computer market isn't rock solid.
He answers only to the CEO, as do all senior VP's. There are just nine of these guys and they're each responsible for a fundamental aspect of Apple's operation.
I agree most corporate titles are complete bullshit, and I'm sure there are also lots of these folks running around at Apple Inc. But imho Apple's Senior VPs aren't really part of that nonsense as their titles actually show their responsibility and function pretty well.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
I wish we had that. I'd be High Potentate And Head Muckety Muck.
No, wait... SENIOR High Potentate And Head Muckety Muck.
FileVault2 is worthwhile.
So is multi-destination Time Machine.
There's a bunch of better integrations to iCloud - which are interesting - and make Time Machine less valuable, at the same time. ;-)
The other cloud/SaaS plugin services are no use to me, as I don't Twit, etc.
I like airplay mirroring. It makes my 1080p TV a big display via Apple TV - without cabling.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Mod up parent. The main reason I moved to Lion was to FINALLY be able to resize windows by selecting anywhere on the frames. This was an obvious and long overdue feature, but they changed many things that didn't need changing. I can think of no reasons to stay on Lion as the grass certainly looks greener on the Mountain, but maybe that's just because my boots are covered in mud.
Yes on the day of release most people either couldn't get a code or Apple was sending out duplicate codes that other people had already redeemed.
would have saved them quite a bit of bandwidth
So does Akamai, which is what Apple uses.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Indeed. It boggles the mind as to why they finally fixed that feature, but still have not enabled simple file operations (copy / paste / rename / etc.) in the File Open and File Save dialogs. I can't tell you how pissed I get when I have to stop what I'm doing, open a Finder window and then navigate all over again to a location just to rename a folder, for example.
This space intentionally left blank.
Yesterday I went to the App Store, only to learn that my 2007 Mac Mini (Purchased in 2008) didn't have the hardware requirements to run OS/X Mountain Lion. I have a 64bit CPU, 2GB ram, but only have 32bit EFI. Apparently the video in this unit isn't supported. I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support. If someone asks why I needed to upgrade - it was required to build and test some open source projects I work on.
Why Apple? This has very little to do with Apple actually. This is more about a lame tech press that treats every Apple press release like something that's going to win them a Pulizter.
"Apple sees record downloads after it pushes users to downloads"
That's not news, that's the kind of math that PolySci professors think you don't need to learn.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Good on you, Apple and all those who live in glass and stainless steel houses who can afford to keep buying the beautiful and sleek Apple hardware on which to run Mountain Lion....
Hmmm. I'm reading your gibberish on a used $400 iMac that can certainly run Mountain Lion.
...just poking MS with a stick to amuse yourself?
It's the simple things that make you smile.
Well and, it's $20 for those three machines, right? I'll say this for Apple... the OS upgrades are reasonably priced, given the margins they get elsewhere.
You must be joking... Steve Jobs spent more than half a decade to design an OS from the ground up (UI wise) to make it useable on a tablet, and you think, citing Jobs, it would be a good idea to bring Jobs's other OS to a tablet?
I honestly cannot think of anything more ridiculous. That's basically what Microsoft tried before the iPad which failed so miserably that everyone forgot tablets existed before the iPad.
You're looking for a job? Try applying to the CEO position of Miscrosoft. You seem to be as smart as he is.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
That's an awesome turn of phrase, I'm surprised Apple did not trademark it.
"There are just nine of these guys"
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne...
Ooooerrrr! Jony Ive must have made them out of Aluminium, maybe Titanium for the Tim Cook's One!
I hear there's actually a few competing products for your operating system money that do just that. In fact, it's safe to say that limited power user oriented features have been one of the chief complaints with apple operating systems for years.
Who cares about Apple OS's?
139 comments and counting.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I would have tried OSX ages ago, if only Apple let me install it on hardware I already owned instead of purchasing new hardware which is spec'd damn near the same as what I've already got.
I would have tried Black Berry OS 10 if only RIM would let me use it on iPhone. Huh?
Apple is not Microsoft, they do not sell operating systems. If you are unwilling to buy an Apple then why would they care if you try OSX?
You don't need a tool. If you open up the package that comes with mountain lion there is a file which is mountable / burnable as a stand alone installer. Very typical of Apple: hard enough to stop people who don't know what they are doing from shooting themselves in the foot, easy enough that if you do know what you are doing you can make your install media.
As with some online rebate redemptions - the system will pick random submissions for additional verification in order to verify that the people applying for the rebate are those intended to get said rebate. Otherwise, they would have to hire dozens of temps to go through millions of submissions of physical articles they'd have to track and ultimately dispose of to handle the rebate. 24-72 hours for the former method, 6-8 weeks (if your lucky) for the other.
A lot of the house-keeping of multiple destination was left to the user. If you want round-robin or first available, etc.? You'd make this manually. But HEY! Time Machine is automatic, right? There is a plethora of AppleScript and even Cocoa Apps to manage this. These are pretty much obsoleted.
I'll defer to the Ars Technica description:
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I don't know if it does limit their OS sales. Lots of people do sell operating systems only. And OpenStep which was essentially an earlier version of OS X was available. People didn't buy OpenStep. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was the first version of OSX available only for Apple hardware and sales have been much much better since they stopped selling OSes.
I was *so* impressed with Apple years ago. My wife had an older OS/X laptop and had just bought a new one. The old one was running when she booted up the new one and during the setup process (all of about 3 minutes to be on the web), it popped up a dialog stating it noticed another laptop was running nearby and would we like to transfer the user settings and data from that machine to this one? Click yes and it was done in no time.
After years of fucking around with Windows systems, it was a joy to see something like that done right. Actually, thats the way I think of OS/X mostly - it works the way I want it to most of the time, and the rest of the time I pay it no attention because its not malfunctioning. I readily admit MS has made great leaps and bounds between Win7 and WinXP, but its still not as polished.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Cute.
Whether it was being downloaded by bots or humans, this story was interesting to me from a distributed payload distribution angle. At 4.1Gb a copy, that many Mountain Lions comes out to over 12 petabytes transferred in under four days. That had potential to clog up Ted Stevens' series of tubes, but I've not heard of any problems.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Before I bought my iMac I did look at Windows machines, and a similarly specced Dell XPS with an IPS 2048x1536 screen would've cost a whopping 25GBP less, would have had a much more annoying OS on it and would not have been so easy to carry up and down stairs. So I wasted the extra 25GBP on an iMac. You only find a similar specced machine for less if you have a shit screen. I quite fancied not having a shit screen for a change.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpcustomb=*1
Take a simple example: OSX share June 2012.
10.4 3%
10.5 (Oct 2007) 12%
10.6 (Aug 2009) 38%
10.7 (July 2011) 47%
Conversely on Windows
XP 47%
Vista (Jan 2007) 7%
Windows 7 (July 2009) 45%
In other words almost 1/2 of all Mac users had upgraded their OS within the last 11 mo. 10.6 and Windows 7 are about the same age 85% of Mac users were that far updates as contrasted with 45% of windows users. Almost 1/2 of Windows users use an OS older than 5 years as contrasted with 3% of mac users.
Because Macs are so much more expensive than PCs their users historically did not upgrade as often.
Not true. Mac users upgrade their hardware more often. They may brag about being able to use their old computers but in practice they don't.
> you are aware -why- there was such a gap between xp and vista, right?
You should measure gaps between final releases, not a release and a beta.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Truly Powerful Users have the Terminal, BASH and Apple scripting, C/C++ and Java compilers, etc etc. I often rename files in my ever-open iTerm, since it is often much faster than using a GUI - the real beauty of a 17" MacBook Pro is the resolution (and multi-monitors) allow you to have so many xterms open at once :)
The Mac is at least as good as Linux for almost all of this (I say this after starting to use Linux a little in 1992 onward and heavily in 1996 to present). Hence, our office of Java developers have mostly migrated from Ubuntu (after the loss of focus on workstation practicalities to chase tablet dreams) to Mac.
Apart from removing the OpenGL pbuffer (which some libraries require) Mountain Lion has been a noticeable improvement over Lion for the guys at our development office.
Many manufacturers sell items to foreign markets, but only wholesale, and leave the marketing to the retailers or importers, in which case a "Marketing" guy is actually going to have a very different job description than a "worldwide marketing" guy.
Also Phil probably has the title in his contract.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
VP of middle eastern marketing,
Read this as "VP of middle earth marketing."
One veep to rule them all,
One veep to find them,
One veep to sell them all and with an iPad blind them,
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Well, if you do the math....
4 days = 345600 seconds
4,100 MB * 4 million = 16,400,000,000 MB
Converting to Mb for bandwidth purposes = 131,200,000,000 Mb
That would average to 379,629 Mb/s, or 370Gb/s
Well, that is still impressive. I'm sure they were serving it off of tens of thousands of machines, spread across many CDN nodes, which would have lowered the impact on the Internet at large.
I just wouldn't want to see their data services bill. :) I'm sure a few someones got filthy rich off of that.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.