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 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.”

Just how many of those users are paid upgrades is tough to say, though. In addition to non-paid use, Apple also allows Mac users to upgrade all their personal Macs for a single $19.99 fee.

What is clear, though, is the low price tag combined with electronic delivery appear to be a winning combination for getting users to quickly move to the new operating system. Chitika notes that it took Apple three months to reach 14 percent market share with Lion, its last update. The Web tracking company said it would expect Apple to hit that goal much faster.

Apple released Mountain Lion, also known as Mac OS 10.8, on Wednesday as a digital download from its Mac App Store.

The update includes a number of features brought over from the iPhone and iPad, including support for iMessage, a notification center, Twitter integration and dictation.