A combination of easy access and a low price has Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion on track to become one of the most quickly adopted operating systems in recent history.
After just its first 48 hours on the market, Apple’s new Mountain Lion already accounts for more than 3 percent of Mac Web traffic, according to numbers provided to AllThingsD by Web tracking firm Chitika.
“Moreover, based on Apple’s June 2012 announcement that there are currently 66 million Mac users in the wild, we can infer that 2.11 million Mac users downloaded OS X Mountain Lion in the past 48 hours,” Chitika said. “Using this figure, if we assume that 90 percent of these users paid to upgrade, OS X Mountain Lion generated $38 million in revenue for Apple in the past 48 hours.”
Apple allows Mac users to upgrade all of their personal Macs for a single $19.99 fee. Many of the downloads can also be attributed to Apple’s Up-to-Date program that allowed recent purchasers of new Mac computers to download a free copy of Mountain Lion.
The low price, combining with easy electronic delivery, has proven to be a winning combination. Users are quickly moving to the new OS. Chitika noted that it took Apple three months to reach a 14 percent market share with its previous OS, Lion. The tracking company expects Apple to hit that number with Mountain Lion much faster.
OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion was released on Wednesday as a digital download from Apple’s Mac App Store.
