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Some news stories make it sound like times must be tough for OS makers. Microsoft's Windows Vista received a lukewarm reception and was recently named PC World's disappointment of 2007. Among the issues cited for the dubious distinction were Vista's various bugs that are to be fixed by service packs, confusing multiple SKUs, one-computer-only licensing, and sometimes substandard gaming performance.

However, Apple Inc. is by no means sharing in these troubles and certainly has cause for celebration. Its new operating system, OS X 10.5 Leopard, quickly moved 2 million units. In its first month, recently released figures now show that Leopard was the best selling Mac OS, ever.

In its first month on the market sales of Apple's Leopard operating systems, or Mac OS 10.5, outpaced its Mac OS 10.4, dubbed Tiger, by 32.8 percent in dollar volume and 20.5 percent in unit volume, according to NPD's U.S. retail point of sale data, said Chris Swenson, director, software industry analysis for NPD.

The data includes sales of the operating system sold at retail but not copies sold within new Mac desktop or notebook computers. The data does include family packs of 5 licenses. Family pack sales were up compared to Tiger with 32.8 percent of Leopard sales coming from family packs compared to 20.4 percent of Tiger unit sales.

NPD, which pulls its numbers primarily from brick-and-mortar retailers but also from a smattering of online sellers, including Apple's online store and Amazon.com , separated the boxed copies of Leopard from any sold preinstalled on new Macs, just as it did with Tiger and the edition before that, dubbed Panther.

Apple, on the other hand, included every possible copy of Leopard when it touted sales of 2 million during the operating system's first weekend.

NPD indicates that Apple has the high end market cornered. In the market for so called "premium" PCs, computers over USD 1,000, Apple computers accounted for 57.53 percent of September sales, where in January 2006 it only accounted for 17.91 percent of sales.

This increase is over three fold and is even more staggering. Apple's solid sales on the high end mean that despite not having the highest sales volumes, it is grabbing a substantial share of the market dollars. According to NPD Apple earned 22.9 percent of the total money spent on PCs in September.

As Swenson predicted in October, the biggest contributing factor to Leopard's success was the larger number of Apple-owned retail stores selling the product. Apple now has about double the number of stores compared with its lineup in May 2005, when Tiger launched.

The time of year also played a part. "They're moving a lot of volume through their stores," said Swenson. "I guess there's something to be said for pushy sales reps talking up the operating system."

Apple has always been an aggressive corporation that has had its ups and downs. It works very hard at times to keep its software and hardware proprietary and closed, something which at times has been a blessing and at others times a burden. Still, its recent efforts have yielded torrid success, and Apple is now treading on unfamiliar territory.