Mac OS X has been available for a month, now-- have you ever wondered how many people have taken the Aqua plunge? Sure, we heard some interesting factoids from Apple in its recent quarterly earnings conference call regarding the new operating system, which Fred described as having prompted a "favorable market reaction": it raked in $19 million in revenue in its very first week, with roughly a third of the copies sold through the Apple Store. If you do the math, that comes out to maybe about 170,000 copies sold in the first seven days of availability. Unfortunately, that still doesn't really give us a feel for what percentage of the Mac population is actually using it.

Luckily, MacCentral has a slew of interesting usage stats courtesy of Macworld's "independent research study." Granted, the numbers only apply to Macworld subscribers who were tapped for the survey and not Mac users overall, but they're still pretty encouraging; for example, "more than two-thirds of Macworld subscribers are either already using or planning to adopt Mac OS X by mid-year." It breaks down like this: one out of five of the subscribers polled is already cranking along in Mac OS X, an additional 8% "plan to buy the current release" but haven't gotten off the couch to do it yet, and two out of five plan to upgrade "when the next [presumably major] release is available," i.e. when Apple starts preloading Mac OS X 10.1 on every Mac it ships starting this summer.

Moreover, of the people who are already using Mac OS X in some fashion, over a third are hardcore users who have pretty much left Mac OS 9 behind, embracing the future for better or worse. (The AtAT staff can't quite live up to that degree of commitment, since we rely on Virtual Game Station for occasional doses of thumb candy-- but otherwise, our PowerBook pretty much stays booted into Mac OS X.) All told, it sounds to us like Mac OS X is gaining some crucial footholds even at this early stage of its life-- and that bodes well for Apple's attempt to pull off yet another death-defying architecture change, on par with the transitions from the Apple ][ to the Mac and the 680x0 to the PowerPC. And that's a reason to heave a pretty hefty sigh of relief, because if Mac OS X doesn't catch on, well, the consequences would be dire at best.