Apple to ship 2 millionth copy of Tiger; Leopard due by 2007

The figure includes copies sold at retail, copies delivered under maintenance agreements and copies bundled with Mac systems shipped, making Tiger Apple’s fastest selling OS release ever.

Developer support for Tiger is also setting new records with hundreds of developers including Microsoft and Adobe announcing support for Tiger, Apple said. To date third party developers have released more than 400 Dashboard widgets, 550 Automator actions and 40 Spotlight plug-ins for Tiger.

“The response to Tiger is off the charts,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Critics are raving, customers are delighted and developers are creating hundreds of widgets and applications that take advantage of Tiger’s incredible innovations like Spotlight, Dashboard and Automator.”

During his opening speech this morning at the company's annual World Wide Developers Conference, Jobs announced that the next — and fifth — major revision of the Mac OS X operating system will be called "Leopard."

“We’re not going to be focusing on it at this conference today, but [...] we intend to release Leopard at the end of 2006 or early 2007 — right around the time Microsoft expects to release Longhorn,” he said.

Jobs promised more information of Leopard (presumably Mac OS X 10.5) during next year's developers conference.