Mac OS X Lion Roars to 1 Million Downloads in First Day

It took but 24 hours for Apple's latest operating system -- Mac OS X Lion -- to claw its way onto over 1 million systems, Apple announced on Thursday. Lion is the eight major release of Apple's OS and was made available through the Mac App Store for $29.99 when it launched on Wednesday.

"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."


Apple fed Lion more than 250 new features, including notable standouts like:

• Resume, which conveniently brings your apps back exactly how you left them when you restart your Mac or quit and relaunch an app;
• Auto Save, which automatically and continuously saves your documents as you work;
• Versions, which automatically records the history of your document as you create it; and
• AirDrop, which finds nearby Macs and automatically sets up a peer-to-peer wireless connection to make transferring files quick and easy.

Apple has been tearing it up lately. The Cupertino outfit recently reported all-time record revenue of $28.57 billion for its fiscal 2011 third quarter ended June 25, 2011, overtaking Microsoft, which itself posted impressive numbers with $17.37 billion for the quarter. Apple also just finished refreshing its product lineup with updated MacBook Air and Mac mini models, and introduced the world's first Thunderbolt display.