June 23 -- Apple today announced that there are over seven million active users of Mac OS X, the world's most advanced operating system, and that the number of Mac OS X applications has doubled to more than 6,000 during the past year, including the recently launched QuarkXPress 6, Photoshop 7, Acrobat 6, Director MX, QuickBooks Pro 5.0, Maya 5 and MATLAB. "With four major Mac OS X releases over the past four years, nothing comes close to the rapid rate of innovation that Mac OS X is delivering to our developers," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "With Mac OS X, Apple is far outpacing any other operating system developer in the industry, leap-frogging the competition while they're hoping to deliver years in the future what we already have today." Apple today also introduced powerful new application development tools called Xcode to enable developers to deliver the next generation of great Mac OS X applications to their customers. "Starting several years ago with Final Cut Pro 1.2, we've used Mac systems to cut over 30 feature films for Showtime, and last year we started moving our operations to Mac OS X," said Tim King, president of iPostini. "The stability and the improved workflow for high-end video on Mac OS X was the best reason for us to begin the move and with the release of Final Cut Pro 4, we have all of our edit suites on Mac OS X." "For technology to be a helpful tool in the classroom, teachers need to trust that it will work when they need it. Teachers know they can count on their Macs working. That is what is most important. All of the incredible multimedia features such as the ability to easily integrate digital video into the classroom are an added bonus," said Steve Carlson, associate superintendent for Information and Technology, Beaverton Public Schools in Beaverton Oregon. "That's why this summer we are bringing 8,000 of our 10,000 Macs to Mac OS X." "Mac OS X is emerging as the premiere UNIX-based scientific workstation platform, running the UNIX tools we need and handling all standard productivity applications as a bonus," said Michael Giddings, professor of Microbiology/Immunology and Biomedical Engineering at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "Mac OS X systems interoperate flawlessly in our mixed computing environment allowing us to get more out of our systems and spend less time keeping them running or having to write specific drivers than we did with Linux. We now run our genome and proteome analysis projects exclusively on Mac."