Analyst: Leopard sales could hit $157 million by year’s end
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Oct 24, 2007 at 11:26am
In discussing Apple’s latest financial results, Chief Operating Officer Tim Book said that Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) could tally US$140 million in sales before the end of the year. However, Ezra Gottheil of Technology Business Research, thinks that figure will be more like $157 million, with another $50 million in the two following quarters.
“The vast majority of Macs shipped in the last four years are able to run Leopard,” Cook said. “Specifically, the number is about 21 million. When we announced Tiger [Mac OS X 10.4], there were 15 million units that were eligible to run Tiger and we did $100 million of revenue on Tiger at the first quarter of launch.”
If Leopard sells to current Mac owners at the same rate, Apple will collect about $140 million in revenues during the current quarter, he added. However, Gottheil came up with his projection by looking at the current installed base of eligible machines and comparing it to what existed when Tiger, debuted in April 2005, notes Macworld UK.
“It really is a function of the installed base,” said Chris Swenson, analyst with the NPD Group. “Each upgrade sold better than the previous one, which is pretty impressive. The first two months after Tiger was launched, it ran 30 per cent higher [in sales volume] than Mac OS X 10.3, and more than twice as high as 10.2.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
