Tokyo: raging Leopard pounces on, eats, helpless Vista

Remembe r when I told you guys of my experience at Apple Store Ginza i n Tokyo a few weeks back? I was thinking during that rainy Friday afternoon for the Leopard launch that it was a bit disconcerting in that I was expecting the line I was in to be long , but not that long (almos t 5 blocks!). Wandering around Tokyo days before, I was already a bit surprised at the ubiqui ty of Macs, which was more than I was accustomed to in my home base of Manila. They were nearly everywhere I happened to be, and in the big p ress rooms of the Tokyo Motorshow I attended, nearly half of t he journalists were tapping away at Powerbooks, Macbooks and < strong>Macbook Pros and iMacs in there. Well, it seems to not just be a prevalent trend or fad. Reports have it that Leopard is now the leading OS in Japan wi th the release of OS X 10.5. The amazing statistic is that Mac OS purchases wen t up over 60% for October, from 15% percent, which is nothing short of phenomen al. This figure topples Microsoft from the top spot for the fi rst time. In fact, Microsoft is on the opposite side of the slope, with sales plunging fr om 75.3% to 28.8% Phenomenal too - in the worst way. In the six days following the Oct.26 release of Leopard, the new Apple OS now h olds the lion's share (so to speak) with 53.9% of the entire OS-only market. Ho o! Go Japan! Arigato gozaimasu! (If you didn't catch it, read my story of Leopard Day in Japan here.)