It's been a busy week for Jobs, Schiller & Co over in Cupertino. On Tuesday, Apple reported record-breaking Q3 financial figures that boosted stock prices to an all-time high. A day later, Apple released a new 27-inch LED-backlit Thunderbolt display and refreshed the Mac Mini and MacBook Air product lines with updated Intel Sandy Bridge hardware.
Apple simultaneously released their latest operating system OS X Lion on these new products and made it available for current owners from the Mac App Store. On Thursday, Apple posted a press release stating that OS X Lion had been downloaded over 1 million times via the Mac App Store.
"Lion is off to a great start, user reviews and industry reaction have been fantastic," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Lion is a huge step forward, it's not only packed with innovative features but it's incredibly easy for users to update their Macs to the best OS we've ever made."
Boasting over 250 new features and 3,000 developer APIs, one key aspect of Lion's early success is no doubt Apple's ridiculously low retail price on the operating system upgrade; a mere $29.99. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft's PC-based Windows 7 operating system, which commands nearly four times as much money for an upgrade copy of Home Premium. Equally as impressive is the fact that these figures don't include OS sales bundled with the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini.
OS X Lion is available now in the Mac App Store as an upgrade to OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard, meaning you will need the previous version installed on your machine.