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84 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16"What we can say which is interesting is that MacIntel went up 0.23% in December, whereas Vista only went up 0.05%. So for December, new Intel Macs outsold Vista by more than 4:1"
If you'd be so kind, please point me to a retailer that will sell you a copy of Windows Vista. Go ahead, I'll wait. Well, at least I'll wait until the day when Vista is actually, you know, released to the general public. You know, because that might make a difference. Because, you know, when you're saying that a certain comparison of sales data is "interesting", as you put it, it might actually be literally "interesting" if the comparison was of products that are actually both available from things called "stores". - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -5/+19These stats are utter Bull****.
Web statistics studies are still biased because they usually exclude Linux sites, they throw away "unknown" (often Linux with diverse http-header footprint/string), they ignore Squid, they don't account for agent forgers (not just for MISE-only sites), and they neglect to account all the traffic that comes from Windows zombies (Windows/IE). - Dweller99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Are you posting this from the future?
Vista will not be released to the public until January 30th. You can get it now through business channels only and it certainly has not been available in those channels for 4 months. - flag564, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15"Vista has been available in (various forms of) Beta for months now."
Yeah, but Joe and Jane PC users dont make a habit of downloading Betas of OSs. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -9/+18Some notes:
1) I was quite surprised that Vista didn't have a bigger gain. Presumably it will really take off when the big manufacturers start selling it pre-installed to consumers.
2) The share for MacOS rose - which it shouldn't have, since Apple doesn't sell PPC computers (G4, G5) any more. So obviously there is significant sampling error and hence the smaller numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
3) Even without combining MacOS and MacIntel they are the #3 and #5 operating systems respectively (with Windows 98 in the middle). Actually, this is an unfair comparison, because one is based on processor architecture, whereas the other is broken down by version. A better comparison would have been if the Mac numbers were broken down by OS version - Tiger (10.4), Panther (10.3) and (pre release) Leopard (10.5 beta). This will be a particularly glaring oversight when Leopard is released and goes head to head with Vista.
4) XP has gained 5.4% since the start of the year, as much as Apple's entire market share (5.39%) back in November. Since Linux and OS X are holding their own, this growth must have come from either expanding the market (and hence shrinking everyone that isn't keeping up), or cannibalising other Windows installs.
5) What we can say which is interesting is that MacIntel went up 0.23% in December, whereas Vista only went up 0.05%. So for December, new Intel Macs outsold Vista by more than 4:1 (but see also point #2 about not getting excited about changes in the smaller numbers) - cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+121) They also may not have counted the transition of machines running beta and RC code to the full version where such an upgrade was available.
2) Apple may not make G4 and G5 systems anymore, but there is still probably a fair number in retail channels to sell off the remaining inventory.
3) Do those releases truly count as seperate OS versions, or as updates to the core Mac OS X version 10? If they were to seperate counting to include beta releases, then they would also have to include the number of systems still running Vista beta code over the same period.
4) That seems likely, as many customers may have moved up to XP after the last announced delay on Vista, or may be migrating into new machines loaded with XP, but capable of upgrading to Vista at a later time.
5) The January number should be interesting too, because there was an expected spike in new Mac sales over the holiday with no new MS OS to directly compete against. - siggyfawn, on 10/12/2007, -11/+19How is this news, or something I care to know?
Mac rose .30%! Mmmkay?
Digg needs some code for
Mac Post
< 1% change in anything
= Lame
Next we'll see black iPod sales rose .00445% last week. CraZiE! - ricodued, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12cquinnd:
Oh, come on (directed towards your third point). Whenever you get into a discussion with Apple folks/fanboys/users about the point-releases just being service packs, they get all defensive about it being "more than just a service pack update" and how it really is a new OS version. Pick a side here, guys. Is it a mere update or a distinctly new OS?
Personally, I think it is a whole new OS as a Mac user and you can immediately tell the significant differences between Jaguar and Tiger and Leopard much as you can between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -12/+19Of course, these stupid mac fanboy articles ONLY include the US in their numbers where ythere are an extreme amount of stupid idiots.
Look at the world wide numbers and mac is still under 2%!
Suck it down you appletards!! - NewChar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I'm interested in actual relevant, useful, interesting Apple stories. iPhone rumors from some Mac blog no one's heard of or weekly marketshare reports about Apple rising .1% are not useful or relevant.
- MacParrot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5OK, so Mac OS share slightly rises in the US, stays the same more or less worldwide. No big surprise as the US is an Apple stronghold (as far as their own marketing and sales goes). I doubt Vista will make a big impact until it is actually released or people get it pre-installed on their computers.
This is hardly very important news, even for Mac fans. Why not more info (hell, even out and out speculation) on what's coming at MacWorld (just no more about the MacPhone/iPhone/PodPhone/mPodPhoneMac or whatever). Less than a week to go and no big rumors out.
I'm going to enjoy it immensely. This will be the first I've gone since they canceled the New York one. Hope to see you there. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10Well, the Ubuntu claims to have 8 million users were just as dodgy if not more so. :D See the recent discussion on that for more information. Anyway, these figures are based on what users are using as their desktops, so Linux's 0.37% is roughly 1.5 million people using Linux as their desktop, an unknown number of which (half? a quarter? a third?) are using Ubuntu as their desktop OS. So if we say a third that is about half a million Ubuntu users, putting the Ubunutu user base at about one 50th of the size of the Mac one.
Which does ignore Linux server farms and the like.
The other points you raise, they do actually have a category for Unknown. But that is in the browser section, and they have 0.01%. Agent forgers probably make up such a small percentage as to not effect the figures. Zombies wouldn't typically grab control of your browser and go off doing some recreational surfing... AI is good, but not good enough that the malware will get bored and go off looking for entertainment. - kelly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I agree.
The title says "market share" rather than install base. Market share is a figure that is restricted to the *sale* of a product as apposed to the usage of a product which is what this statistic is trying to calculate by measuring web usage... which is a misleading statistic for many other reasons
When you calculate the actual usage of a product rather than its sale... Windows comes down in share and linux and OS X goes up. - PuffyC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Vista isn't available to the general public yet. Any assumptions made about Vista are pointless.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Macparrot -
Are you kidding? A recent submission that compared the ipod to zune and a couple of other mp3 players was quickly buried simply because the ipod didn't come out on top.
THATS the kind of fanatical 'ignore all the facts' mentality a LOTS of the mac fanboys on digg have!
I quite like macs, I own one myself, but its just a damn tool! I'm not going to slit my wrists when Steve Jobs hiccups, and I certainly don't go around arbitrarily burying every non-mac story simply because "if its not mac its not good' like a lot of diggers seem to do!
Nor do I ever digg up any pro-MS/windows story simply because its MS/windows! Thats just frigging stupid, but the mac fanboys do just that!
The lengths these rabid fanboys go to to defend apple corporation is truly pathetic, its almost as if they think they'll get a better place in heaven or something.
I use the term 'appletards' for good reason! They really are retarded if they think their choice in operating systems (coz macs are now just asus manufactured PCs with a TC chip) makes them better people with the right to look down their noses on everybody else.
I think its good that the mac share is rising, it will help make ALL OSs better, but for some lameass story about a pathetic .3% rise in the marketshare to reach the homepage is just the depths of lunacy!!
BTW, I have not dugg your comment down. Seems other people feel the same as I do about the disproportionaly loud apple 'voice' here on digg. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Nah, hes just using 'Daniel Eran maths' to try to make himself feel better!
- silverj, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Maybe because Vista is better all-round?
- adiosk8, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6This site doesn't seem all that accurate
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4gmarks...well, according to OTHER market polls like this, it did not go up at all.
It is funny...in 2 months if this very same method were used and found a decrease, the Apple fanboys would scream that the way they come up with thenumbers is inaccurate.
Recently there was a submission claiming that Firefox had 25% market share (laughable.) The SAME article using the same method showed that Apple had 3% share.
OF course, the fanboys all said the browser study was accurate, but the OS one was not.
can't have it both ways, hypocrites. - DoTheFandango, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you used Vista, you would get why.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Its just the apple cultists way of feeling loved!
Seriously, why are they so ***** retarded as to think that EVERY ***** APPLE STORY has to reach the damn front page!!
They account for significantly less than 5% of PC users (coz apples are just overpriced PCs now) and yet their pathetic "waaaa , we have shiny expensive ***** and we have to tell everyone" cries drown out everything else.
Are they really that insecure about themselves? It certainly seems that way! - ricodued, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Hm. I take my comment back. It seems a little harsh towards the original poster, and I see he didn't mean to take a side.
Whoops. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"The point here is, you first have to hit their servers for them to count you in the stats"
Actually, no, you don't.
The statistical techniques for taking a smaller sample of a general population and applying the information from that smaller sample to the larger sample are well established.
You see this in action elsewhere, particularly in politics. If they talk about the approval rating of the president that is not based on going out and asking every single person out there, but only a small sample. So they will say something like "approval rating of president now at 40%, plus or minus 2%". Or "in Ohio the democrats have 50%, the republicans have 37% with 12% still undecided" which again is not based on polling every single person living in the state of Ohio.
What we don't know here is the margin for error, which presumably is largish. But the _trends_ are the interesting thing anyway, not the actual numbers.
So your father is counted 'by proxy', since it is a fairly safe assumption that usage of people off the net is pretty close to usage of people on the net. - bobbyi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2.3% is very likely smaller than the margin of error for their poll, so this isn't meaningful at all.
- shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"Well, the Ubuntu claims to have 8 million users were just as dodgy if not more so."
oh and what evidence do you have of that? that number came from mark shuttleworth himself, and he is much more an authority on the issue than you are, so you'd better back that statement up with something good (you don't actually have any evidence....) - gmarks, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3How about over the course of one year, check that information.
- siggyfawn, on 10/12/2007, -8/+10Like I said, this being on the front page of Digg is laughable.
- lysdexia, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well!
If Macs continue to grow at this rate and windows does, too, then Macs will always be a minority, niche interest machine.
Just as it ever was. For the life of me I cannot understand why this causes interest let alone something akin to excitement. - siggyfawn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3^^^ I agree. I love Mac. I love iPods. I like good news about both.
But .30% market share reports? On front page of Digg? Cmon. The margin for error is probably 1%.
Anything with Apple/MAC in the title just gets free clicks. Lets try to keep the frontpage of Digg for interesting/important stories. This isn't even close. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"gmarks...well, according to OTHER market polls like this, it did not go up at all."
Please cite sources. Eg links to these mysterious 'other market polls'. - Sp1k3d, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Where did they get that Linux statistic from? Ubuntu, according to Canonical has 1% of the desktop market alone (8 Million unique users) and approximately 27% of Linux installs to date. Linux has around a 3-5% install base, not 0.37%. Linux will still probably be #3 in 2007 but Linux on the desktop is starting to advance much more quickly than Mac OS X thanks to a modularized X server, and the momentum of developers now working on desktop Linux. This advancement in technology will take a few years to translate into hard install base, but in the meantime Linux will become the darling of the computer industry, pushing forward the desktop much as OS X has in the past 6 years.
- axemachine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think you are going to be in trouble if some time in the future the company that hired you to keep them running can't run some vertical/custom application on their systems just because now they have a mixed enviroment (not to mention more expensive looking computers.)
The company I work for took charge of another small company and low and behold they had some Macs. Try to explain to the new managment they need to spend money in new computers because the "old" IT guy is a Mac person and wasted money in some "pretty" computers that can't run their applications now. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Good question. The source I was citing was:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Over_8_million_Ubuntu_users
Before it descended into a flamewar it had a couple of interesting points about how counting IPs at the repository might not be such a good idea:
For instance you have the problems of re-installs, dynamic IPs being double counted etc. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You are right. And quoting to hundredths of a percentage point _is_ silly, especially when we do not know the margin for error.
What this site _is_ actually good for is for the trends. Or in other words, by comparing their semi-bogus data for this month with their semi-bogus data (gathered using the same methods) for last month we can actually extract some non bogus information.
So we see that XP, Mac OS X and Vista are gaining in 'market share' (as measured by these bozos).
Linux remains steady.
Windows 2000 is plummeting like a rock.
And we can look at this and say things like:
"So how come with Vista now released XP is still rising?"
"Why are people abandoning 2000 in such large numbers now? (And not going to Vista?)"
"Linux market share continues to do diddly/squat" (I seem to have annoyed the Linux fanboiys by pointing this out, might as well pour a little more gasoline on that one while I'm at it)
One of the nice things about these stats is that if someone turns off their machine and puts it in permanent storage (read as: landfill) then it will stop counting towards the figures for 'market share'.
Whereas measures of 'market share' which are based solely on sales neglect that, and are actually a lot _worse_ for Linux (here comes the olive branch as it were), since just about all the big retailers don't offer anything but Windows, so if you buy a machine and the first thing you do when you get it home is defenestrate it and install the Linux of your choice, most other ways of counting 'market share' count that as a 1 for Windows and a 0 for Linux which is really unfair and far more misleading than what the people at the site the article points at are doing. - matt.rubin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I like how windows 2000 has a bigger market share than OSX
- rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Linux will have a larger share of the overall market. As for the Mac, the figures roughly stack up with what Steve Jobs said (last year or possibly earlier) about there being 19 million people using OS X.
What this shows is that although Linux has a large share of the market, it is mainly in use as a server OS and not as a 'consumer' OS, or in other words that people aren't using it as their desktop system.
Even if the Ubuntu guys are right and that Ubuntu has 8 million downloads, it will have less than 0.5 million users. Which shows that it still has quite a way to go for N to be 'the year of desktop Linux' (where N = current year). And also note the hazard of comparing _downloads_ with _users_ with _market share_. Each of these is going to be different depending on what you are trying to measure.
The overall trend is that Linux adoption is going nowhere as a desktop OS (despite whatever its actual merits may or may not be), and that OS X is rising.
So whatever the Linux guys are doing to get the message out is basically not working (if they really do have a superior product). But it is not all bad news, at least they are holding their own against the marketing juggernauts that are Microsoft and Apple. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15.67% i am sure that number is right, to me it feels more like 5.68%
- HideoKojima, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1hahaha keep dreaming, crapple will always be the underdog.
- Altotus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That's a little short sighted. People don't typically *CHOOSE* Windows, they buy a copy that comes preinstalled on the hardware. Vista will outsell Mac OS/X simply because OEMS other than Apple will ship their hardware with it. And, unless you're a power user and have some fairly specific needs, the OS probably isn't so relevent outside of how difficult it is to get whatever games you want running on it.
Articles like this are kind of daffy. The sampling approach used is very flawed. You can't postulate market share of an OS by this method any more than you can based on unit sales or licenses shipped. The fact is that a license doesn't mean that it's used or installed (all of my companies machines come with one OS, but are immediately reimaged with another under an enterprise license that doesn't have a precise number attached to it). Web browsers and proxies consistently lie about what they are, sites typically have unrepresentative populations that browse them (Google is perhaps the most generic).
I've got family in Europe and the education system uses Linux almost exclusively there, yet all those machines have Windows licenses and nothing that indicates a Linux "sale" and they are typically configured to have Firefox with an IE agent string.
I work in the Biotech industry, so most of our domain-specific applications are Linux-based (save for secretarial work like e-mail, scheduling, and word-processing) with fairly few exceptions (most of our instrumentation is going this route too). Most users however, use a Mac or Windows as a graphical dumb-terminal or web-client -- and Linux works every bit as well (better for those that have become familiar with the desktop environment).
Any disparity in the "market share" for desktop in the business arena has nothing to do with the fitness of it. Mac is limited because it's restricted to specific hardware. Linux is limited primarily because the machines that you run it on come with a Windows OS that's just as good because the OS is largely irrelevant. - Lynn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@rickcarson
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2006/December/os.php - Johannesrexx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Windoze fanboys like to diss the mac fanboys, but Apple has not been twice convicted of monopoly practices while MS has. Microsoft is an unethical business, and by associating with them, you windoze fanboys put your ethics up for question.
As we speak, MS is using its monopoly profits from Windows and Office to try to penetrate other areas, like game consoles, and have lost over 4 billion to date on XBOX. I thought that was supposed to be illegal, using your monopoly in one market to take over another?
But windows is just a tool ..... uhuh. There is more to the story. - ShrimpCrackers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2With reality distortion math, it means that Apple has increased its market share by much over 10% last year.
However with real math, it looks like at this rate Apple will overtake Microsoft in just 200 or so years! - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If they continue to grow at the same rate, then they will have 9% at the end of this year (end of 2007). And then 10% by about April/May of 2008, which should get them a bit more loving from software development companies.
And _maybe_ at some point their profile will rise enough that people will actually realise that there is a choice other than Windows, Windows and more Windows. And so some people talk about 'tipping points' as though one day Apple will magically leap from 12% to 60% (NB: not physically possible unless the Windows machines stop working all at once (Igor! Hurry up with that Doomsday virus already! *cracks whip*))
Personally, I don't think the 9% thing will happen in 2007. Maybe by the end of 2008. Apple's major impediment to getting a big chunk of the overall market is that Microsoft has the business world locked down pretty tightly, and Apple doesn't seem interested in competing with them in that arena.
So if there is any tipping point, you'll know about it when all the Fortune 500 companies switch to OS X. - moofer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Um... yeah... Awesome survey. If you take one of the polls in the sidebar, you'll see how thorough and accurate this *****-tank is. For example:
Which Browser is Better?:
Firefox: 60.93%
Safari: 17.84%
Opera: 10.61%
Internet Explorer: 9.31%
Netscape: 1.05%
Opera is better than Firefox: .10%
I love laura and kitties: .03%
seth dowling rules: .02%
Zane eats farts: .02%
No: .01%
I think I'll get my numbers from someone else. - catmistake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"OS X x86" or Marklar, means OS X on intel
"OS X PPC" means OS X on PowerPC
and Mac OS... pretty much means anything equal or less than System 9.2
how could someone come up with such specific numbers about operating systems, and not know the names of the operating systems? - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Microsoft's marketing-fu is indeed very strong.
Additionally, people often project wildly into the future and assume that in ten years Microsoft's empire will be gone. However, their basic assumption is that Microsoft will just sit there doing nothing waiting for everyone else to beat them to death, which is a fairly bad assumption as assumptions go.
For such a large company Microsoft is pretty nimble, and they are doing a good job of fighting everyone else off, especially given that their competitors (Google, Linux, OpenOffice) are all offering _free_ products and services. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dude, I already pointed that out, in like the third sentence...
"Presumably it will really take off when the big manufacturers start selling it pre-installed to consumers." - shrewduser, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i meant the source backing up your statement that that wasn't the case,
mark shuttleworth never mentioned how hw got those results, and he said that there were "at least" 8 million meaning he took the problems of counting into consideration. - rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Here's the business case:
(1) Ignore the cost of Windows. If you were going to use non Macs you'd pay all those costs and licensing fees anyway.
(2) Compare the price of the Mac Hardware + Parallels with your other vendors.
If nothing else, if you threaten them with Apple, you should get Dell and Compaq to come down in price a bit.
I've read that the real difficulty in bringing in Macs into a business is that Apple provides no road-plan for their future direction. - jsusanka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I question the real numbers on here - how is the traffice taken - can the browser be running as windows xp but yet it is still running on mac or linux. -
I tend to think that the linux and mac os has a larger pecentage. -
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