Apple's Mountain Lion Off to a Roaring Start
Thanks to its easy download and low price, Apple's Mountain Lion appears on pace to be one of the most quickly adopted operating systems in history. — After just its first 48 hours on the market, Apple's new Mountain Lion already accounts …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mountain Lion's first-48-hours surge caps an arc the corpus has tracked since 2007: Leopard launched as a boxed product whose early adopters bore the pain (Leopard early adopters suffered so the rest of us didn't have to), and by 2009 Snow Leopard was already outselling every prior OS X launch in its opening window (NPD's launch-week numbers). What changed this week is distribution — Apple confirmed on July 24 that the upgrade would ship only through the Mac App Store at $19.99 (the $19.99 App Store release), removing retail boxes entirely.
The breadth of pickup matters too: eight outlets including VentureBeat, GigaOM, TechCrunch and Chitika Insights carried the adoption story on day two, with Chitika measuring it from web traffic rather than store sales — a sign that OS adoption is now read off live network data instead of NPD's retail tallies.
First-order effects
- Mac owners can upgrade the entire OS for $19.99 without leaving their desk, which is why adoption in the first 48 hours is already pacing ahead of prior launches that required a store trip.
- Developers shipping Mac software get a large pool of upgraded machines almost immediately, raising the stakes for compatibility with what Apple added and removed in Mountain Lion — the feature culls Gizmodo catalogued back in February (what Apple is trying to kill with this release).
Second-order effects
- A $19.99 flagship OS sets a price anchor that pressures every other paid desktop-software upgrade cycle: if the platform vendor charges less than an app update, third-party upgrade pricing has to justify itself against Apple's number.
- With the Mac App Store as the only channel, Apple controls discovery, patching and payment for the whole OS base — marginalizing any remaining boxed-software retail for Macs and pulling more third-party developers toward the storefront.
Third-order effects
- If each release keeps getting cheaper and faster to adopt, OS X moves from a once-per-few-years purchase to an annual, near-impulse upgrade — turning the operating system into a recurring relationship rather than a product event.
- Adoption metrics themselves shift structurally: when NPD counted boxes for Snow Leopard in 2009 and Chitika samples web traffic for Mountain Lion in 2012, the industry's scoreboard for OS success migrates from retail sell-through to live usage share.
The trend: Desktop operating systems are becoming cheap, frequently shipped App Store downloads whose success is measured in days of live usage data rather than weeks of retail sales.