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Apple said Tuesday that it sold over two million copies of Mac OS X Leopard since its release on Friday, far outpacing the first-weekend sales of Mac OS X Tiger, which was previously the most successful OS release in the company’s history.
Sales included copies sold at Apple’s retail stores, Apple Authorized Resellers, the online Apple Store, under maintenance agreements and bundled with new Mac computers. In comparison, it took the Cupertino-based Mac maker approximately six weeks to ship its 2 millionth copy of Mac OS X Tiger back in 2005.
"Early indications are that Leopard will be a huge hit with customers," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. "Leopard’s innovative features are getting great reviews and making more people than ever think about switching to the Mac."
Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X and is packed with more than 300 new features. Among them is Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; and major enhancements to Mail and iChat. [AppleInsider]

Electronics maker Apple Inc. (formerly Apple Computer) saw profits surge by 67% in the three months to the end of September, thanks to demand for its widely popular Mac computers and iPods. The company also announced that it had sold more than one million units of its new iPhone, helping it make a whopping $904 million in the period, against $542m a year before. Total sales reached $6.2 billion as Apple set a record for the number of its computers sold in a quarter. The results comfortably beat expectations of analysts. 
Apple said it had sold 1.12 million iPhones - towards the top end of predictions, while it also shipped 2.2 million Macintosh computers and 10.2 million iPods. Analyst Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies said that iPhone sales were raising awareness of the brand. "There’s no question that Mac sales are still having a halo effect from the iPod and iPhone," he said. "Our own survey of Apple stores shows that Mac [computer] sales continued to be strong even in this last quarter. More and more people have become interested in the Mac because of Apple’s ease of use."
View: Full Story on the BBC

No longer content to be hooked up to your big screen HDTV and 7-channel surround sound system, Aspyr and Activision have announced that Guitar Hero III is rockin’ on over to the more moderately sized screens of your Mac and/or PC this fall. We imagine legions of cubicle dwellers violating their company’s IT policies, bringing their axe into work, and shredding the pain of office life away. More likely, we can imagine a portable rig on your laptop, just in case that whole Guitar Hero DS thing doesn’t work out.
GameDaily spoke with Aspyr’s Jay Gordon about the port, and got some burning questions answered: the game will ship simultaneously with its console counterparts; the guitar will be a USB model of the Gibson (sorry 486 gamers); and no word on how downloadable songs will be distributed but they’ll share soon. And with this, the PSP remains alone, the only major gaming platform without Guitar Hero.[Joystiq]

Apple announced today a new range of iPods ready for the holiday season.
Big on the list is the iPod touch which is near identical to the iPhone apart from that it’s thinner and has no phone functionality. Also, the nano has been updated to include video support and is a little fatter than previous versions but still incredibly thin. The iPhone has now also dropped in price so the new price is $399 for the 8GB model. The 4GB versions price is now…..$0 as it is dead.
View: iPod Touch
View: iPod Nano

As indicated in a previous post, we’re homing in on the launch of Silverlight 1.0, and today marks another milestone with the launch of the first release candidate. Since the beta we released at MIX, we’ve fixed approximately 2000 bugs and work items and we’re now feature complete with the final JavaScript-based API. This version of the runtime is vastly more stable than the beta release: our stress test runs show improvements of two or three orders of magnitude in many cases, and the product demonstrates the polish one might expect from a near-final release. 

Along with the 1.0 RC1 release, we’ve also refreshed the 1.1 bits. We’ve not exposed any significant changes in the .NET extensions, but the 1.1 “alpha refresh” includes the same core runtime as 1.0 RC1. A note on installation: if you have the beta release on your machine, there’s no need to uninstall - simply run the RC1 installer and it will overwrite the existing binaries on your machine. [MSDN Blogs]

Download:

• Silverlight 1.0 RC1 / Windows (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.0 RC1 / Mac (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh / Windows (direct link)
• Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh / Mac (direct link)

Gears of War, the hit third-person action game, is bound for the Mac along with Unreal Tournament 3, Epic Games vice president and co-founder Mark Rein revealed to Game Trailers.

In the interview with Geoff Keighley of Spike TV’s “Game Head” show (available for viewing in QuickTime format at Gametrailers.com), Rein let the news of a Mac version of Gears of War slip out.

Gears of War is a third-person action game with elements of tactics and horror. The game puts you in the role of Marcus Fenix as he fights against the “Locust Horde,” a nightmarish horde of creatures. It’s powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, which is being used to develop Unreal Tournament 3—formerly known as Unreal Tournament 2007—which is slated for a Christmas 2007 debut on some game platforms.

Gears of War has been, to date, an Xbox 360 exclusive. In the interview, after Keighley asked Rein if he had any misgivings about Epic’s decision to bring that game to Sony’s PlayStation 3, a competing platform, Rein emphasized Epic’s position as an independent developer of game technology. The company first showed Unreal Engine 3 running a PlayStation 3 development console in 2005, long before the console was available to the public.

Rein then added, “Don’t forget, we’re also doing Macintosh.”
“Gears of War is coming to the Mac?” asked Keighley.
“Yes, Gears is going to come to the Mac and so is UT,” said Rein, referring to Unreal Tournament 3.

Epic’s plans for Unreal Tournament 3 shouldn’t surprise Mac fans—Rein has mentioned it on Epic’s online discussion forums and elsewhere for months, and Epic founder Tim Sweeney has also mentioned the engine’s suitability for use on the Mac. The Gears of War disclosure is new, however, and its appearance on the Mac platform will be welcome news for action game enthusiasts.
The only thing missing from this is official confirmation from MacSoft, Epic’s de facto Macintosh business partner, about what role (if any) it will have in bringing these games to the Mac. Epic has long had a presence on the Mac platform thanks to MacSoft. In its early days Epic published games through GT Interactive Software, where Epic first developed a publishing relationship with GT subsidiary MacSoft that continues to today.

MacSoft, now a division of Destineer, has published Macintosh versions of Epic’s Unreal, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 games. Several Unreal Engine-based games, including some of those published by MacSoft, have been ported to the Mac by Ryan Gordon, a developer with extensive experience with Mac OS X and Linux game conversions. As Macworld posted this article, MacSoft had not yet confirmed plans to release either Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3 for the Macintosh.

News Source: MacWorld