With previous releases of Mac OS, Apple had to stop development about a month before it was supposed to ship, so disks could be manufactured. After manufacturing, disks had to be shipped to stores and other retail outlets, which costs quite a bit of money when you add it all up. Yesterday, they released Lion on the Mac App Store and paid whatever distribution it costs to have it downloaded. That’s it. $29.99 x 1 million sold.
No damn wonder Apple can pull in a $7 billion profit in one quarter. Good on you Apple.
With Apple’s cash reserves and income $30M is no more than a rounding error. But with the new distribution method they’re rounding up instead of rounding down. 🙂
not pure profit, however, given development and infrastructure costs. that said, I expect the profit level is still pretty substantial. how much does it cost to develop, maintain, and mature a computer operating system?
How many of the 1 million were free “OS Up To Date” and Developer copies?
I see where you’re going with this…but the headline is a tad bit disingenuous, no?
Bandwidth, datacenters, server infrastructure, support crew don’t have any marginal cost? That’s amazing. Let me call up my ISP and demand a discount.
Of course there are costs, but presumably they are far less than to distribute to all sales outlets across the world. Not to mention, they don’t have to sell at a discount to their authorized resellers, which of course helps them price at 29.99
not many if like me-are still waiting for my up to date code. I sent it in about 12:00 the day it was released.
NOT TRUE.
1 million downloads does NOT = 1 million sold.
I bought 1 copy of Lion and downloaded it twice–once for my mac pro and second for my macbook. I bet many others did too.