A week ago today, Apple released its new operating system, Mac OS X v10.6 — better known worldwide as “Snow Leopard”. Announced to the public and released to developers in early June, “Snow Leopard” has been getting shout-outs in advertising for new Macs (including those sold on eBay) for a few months now, but only upon its official release has the buzz really taken off.

Consider, for instance, that in the 30 days prior to August 28th (release day), Terapeak shows 1,807 eBay listings that used the keywords “Snow” and “Leopard”. The sell-through rate of those listings? 29.28%. In the 5 days following release, there were 635 listings… and the sell-through shot to 59.37%.

Of course that’s not the hugest sample size, and it deals with “Snow Leopard” as keywords directly… so consider instead the keywords “New” and “Macbook”. In the 30 days preceding August 28th, Terapeak All Sites shows 16,025 listings for “New Macbook”, with a sell-through rate of 36.04%. But in the 5 days after Snow Leopard’s launch, the sell-through on those same laptops rocketed to 48.87%.

We don’t really talk about sell-through on the blog as much as we’d like to, considering it’s one of our fave statistics, but often that’s because inventory rises alongside demand, and sell-through doesn’t always fluctuate much. In this case, however, demand for new Macs is at an all-time high, even at a time (”back-to-school”) when most suppliers are as well-stocked as they’ll be all year… and Snow Leopard has helped contribute to that big-time.

So, are we saying you should go out and start selling Macbooks? Well, no, that’s not exactly the easiest market to break into. But do have a look at sell-through when you can, and take note when you see it trending up specifically.

If you’re a long-time Terapeak subscriber and/or blog reader, you’ll know we’ve had a keen interest in iPhones since the first 3G models were released last summer. It wasn’t hard to predict then that the device would become an instant eBay superstar, and so the Terapeak iPhone index became the very first in our collection of Terapeak indexes.

Fast forward to a week ago yesterday, when Apple dropped the price of its entry-level iPhone to $99 USD, and many began wondering how in-store price cuts would affect eBay sales. Well, as you can see below, the immediate reaction has been anything but slow:

The above image, of course, was captured using the Terapeak iPhone index, which we’ll surely be following in the coming weeks, and shows an incredible spike in both 3G and Locked iPhone total sales. You can also track iPhone (and Blackberry) sales using the index’s companion widget, as seen below:

And one last point of interest, as mentioned in the previously-linked-to Metro article: Apple has also unveiled its 3GS iPhone — a supposedly faster, more expensive model that records video — and will begin selling those later this month.

Suffice to say, Apple and the iPhone folks aren’t dropping off the eBay radar anytime soon!

Terapeak’s iPhone Index is now online! This new index provides a very cool way to keep watch on the evolving iPhone market. The embeddable widget tracks locked vs. unlocked iPhone sales on eBay, and the differences are really interesting. You can add your affiliate id to the widget for marketing, and, due to the widget-based nature of the index, you can share near real-time data by embedding it into your blogs!

Share data like…the average price for a locked iPhone was $493.53 at time of writing. The average unlocked iPhone is selling for considerably more – $603.05. This same time frame saw 354 unlocked iPhones sold in a single day, and only 139 locked ones. This reveals a significant market preference for the unlocked iPhones! In total, $60,075 worth of locked iPhones sold in a single day, while the vastly more popular unlocked iPhones scored $192,808 in sales (that’s more than three times of the locked revenue).

Fred Speckeen, CEO of parent company AERS Inc., says, “This widget is a lot of fun. It sits on top of a tremendous mine of ecommerce information. Our Fortune 500 clients benefit tremendously from our price, volume, buyer demographics and geographic analytics. Updated daily, our analytics show today what will be news for their competitors three months from now…”

As iPhone aficionados everywhere watched Steve Jobs’ much anticipated keynote speech at the June 9th Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and the resulting release of the 3G iPhone, means the iPhone Index will be one to watch as the market changes.

Please visit www.terapeak.com/iphone to view the entire index, and grab your own embeddable widget to share from the top right hand corner of the index!