Apple OS X Mountain Lion hits 3.2% penetration in two days

The positive results were revealed in a Friday report from Chitika Insights (via All Things D), the research arm of ad company Chitika, which monitors and analyzes web traffic across its network.

"[B]ased on Apple’s June 2012 announcement that there are currently 66 million Mac users in the wild, we can infer that 2.11 million Mac users downloaded OS X Mountain Lion in the past 48 hours,” Chitika said. “Using this figure, if we assume that 90 percent of these users paid to upgrade, OS X Mountain Lion generated $38 million in revenue for Apple in the past 48 hours."

As noted by the publication, the exact number of paid downloads can't be verified as Apple is allowing users to update all their Macs for the one-time $19.99 charge.

Breaking down the numbers, Chitika said Mountain Lion's usage rate after 48 hours neared that of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Most Mac users are still working on machines running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard which accounted for 45 percent of web traffic.

"It is rather impressive for an operating system to capture 3.2% of market web usage after just 48 hours on the market. Such figures are likely supported by a relatively low price point for the operating system as well as an expansive list of desired feature improvements," Chitika writes.