Sales of Mac OS X Leopard will hit 9m in first year

Yet more analytical BS from Macnn.. It sure has got boring.

Does anyone else take issue with this?

I'm certainly going to upgrade to Leopard, but expecting 40% of the user base to upgrade to Leopard this year? I'm not even sure that 40% of the user base even owns a machine capable of running Leopard.

Given the general longevity of Macs... most PCs have long been lying in landfills, while Macs of similar vintage are happily and productively running... I know people with 1st and 2nd generation iMacs that run Tiger...

Plus, many "share" their System installers with family and friends, so that tilts the numbers, too.

Anyway, I seriously doubt that anyone has any idea how many Macs are in actual use. You can bet it's much higher than the typical 25 million number you see being tossed around.

upgrading my Powerbook G4 1.0GHz in fact, i turned my old B&W G3 400MHz into a file server running OS X Server 10.4.3 and that runs very well!!

Besides, i may be incorrect but i read somewhere a few months ago that 10.5 will support G3 systems, along with G4 and G5 PPC. Beyond 10.5.... not so much. i think it is the last OS upgrade for PPC systems.

I just can't see Leopard piling in 9 million sales in the first year (unless that includes the number included with new computers). As is said so much of the PC crowd, most users DON'T upgrade their OS when a new one comes out. They use what they got (mainly because it probably works).

Plus, so far from the inital showing, there isn't much "must have" stuff in leopard to really drive the casual users to purchase it (of course, we're still waiting to find out all those super-secret features that Steve promised us, so those might be the whiz-bang, gots to have stuff we're all waiting for).

And lest we forget that we need to also wait and find out how many of our apps we use day-to-day don't work correctly and need upgrading. And what about drivers for hardware? I think one thing we know for sure: Firewire devices will have a hard time with the update, and if you leave it turned on while you upgrade, you'll probably lose a bunch of data (hey, but since that happens with every OS X version, its not really Kreskin-like. Sorry).

What strange projections when we don't have a release date yet. It can be anytime from March 22nd to June 20th. The later it starts, the longer it will take Apple to reach those figures. Better to predict sales once a release date has been set. At least you can compare Apple's history to a known number of days.

it is a little disingenuous to say there aren't any "must have" features in Leopard...maybe not for you, but your opinion isn't the rule.

There are numerous feature that many people will consider must-haves, and many of the "under the hood" improvements that so many people are quick to dismiss are the features that will dramatically improve what the apps you use are capable of.

Hardware drivers??? I've never had an upgrade that ended up breaking interoperability with any hardware and required a driver upgrade. If it does occur, it is likely to be with some specialized, obscure, non-mainstream hardware.

And, what makes you think firewire devices will have a "hard time?" I've never had issues with firewire. I don't remove my firewire devices during updates/upgrrades, and everything works fine afterwards.

Making the abomination called Spotlight less of an abomination would make the upgrade to Leopard worth the expense and hassle for sure!

Regarding the FireWire problems louzer is dredging up, there was a long ago episode when Panther was released. A few FireWire drives with chipsets with old firmware did lose data if they were connected during the upgrade process.

Of course, these people should of had backups of their data, not relying on a FireWire drive for their only place to store their data.

Apparently people here don't read other boards often. It is a long held standard practice these days to completely turn off and disconnect firewire devices before performing OS updates, as, for some reason, OS X has difficulty not screwing up the drive contents, even if its not being updated per se.

Of course, these people should of had backups of their data, not relying on a FireWire drive for their only place to store their data.

Umm, what if the firewire device IS their backup?

As for There are numerous feature that many people will consider must-haves, and many of the "under the hood" improvements that so many people are quick to dismiss are the features that will dramatically improve what the apps you use are capable of.

Please list them. I'd love to know what Leopard features are must haves. Time machine sounds nice, but I don't see that as a must have for most, since most people don't have external hard drives, nor do they backup as it is.

As for 'under the hood' improvements, these may be great, but it will require users to (a) actually understand and grasp the excitement that Core Animation, for example, will bring to them, (b) hope their hardware supports the whiz-bang new feature, (b) upgrade their OS, (c) upgrade their apps that take advantage of these new features, whenever that may be. Keep in mind that just because an OS has the feature doesn't mean apps are just waiting to release their updates when Leopard rolls.

Plus, let's be serious, the amount of info Apple puts out about these 'features' make it less then clear as to how they'll work. And it makes one wonder more and more about these 'secret' features apple is promising. The longer they are secret, the less likely very many apps will take advantage of them for a long time.

"It is a long held standard practice these days to completely turn off and disconnect firewire devices before performing OS updates, as, for some reason, OS X has difficulty not screwing up the drive contents, even if its not being updated per se. "

Uhm... yeah right. That's one of those myths that perpetuate because there are a small handful of anecdotes around them. Just like "repairing permissions" and clean-installing the OS every few months.

Although, it's never a good idea to keep your backup online 24/7 - a power surge or something else can take it out. Other than that one Firewire chipset problem (which I believe was solved with a firmware update), and the iTunes 2 update, I've never heard of an Apple software install taking out everyone's external FW drive.