Report: Mac Market Share Dipped in Oct., Vista’s Grew 7%

Totally agree with the comments regarding Apple. OS software are complex beasts and no company has managed to produce an error-free OS yet. I purchased the iPhone because of Apple’s reputation and I’ve become a much more educated consumer as a result of that purchase. I still believe that Apple has better ideas and I would probably purchase more Apple equipment IF their pricing reflected the reality of their products. But there is so much hype around Apple it’s hard to separate fact from fiction when it comes to their overall quality. I’m a stockholder of Apple and I believe in their products, but I also believe that in order to enjoy their growing marketshare, they really need to spend more time and money in their quality assurance areas.

Heaven forbid anyone says anything remotely negative about Apple or their OS. It seems all the Apple Heads come out of nowhere and bash anyone who gives an opinion about Apple related products. “Apple doesnt crash, Apple is better than Windows..” that will be the eternal cry from the Apple fanboys. My first computer was an Apple and I thought it was amazing(when I was in the third grade approximately 23 years ago).In Art School we used Macs and they were crashing all the time, WTF, so don’t sit there defending something with obvious faults.I’m all for diversity in the tech world but you Apple people are fanatical to a fault. Simple stat for the reason you see more hacks and crashes etc with Windows based boxes: They have over 90% of the market share. Macs are just as hackable and prone to viruses as any other box but how many 15yr old blackhatters out there have a Mac? You’ll never have a perfect machine, a perfect OS, a perfect config, etc. The perfect computer exists in the minds of those heavily influenced by either crack or LSD.

I am curious how many people bout a Vista machine because that’s what it shipped with, and replaced the OS with something else…

I love it when I see a headline like this. It means that I get to read all of the entertaining retorts of the great apple defenders alliance. You mean the title is slanted to get my attention? And the facts are slanted to support the writers proclamation? Say it isn’t so Joe!

An operating system is an operating system is an operating system. Repeat until it sinks in.

I am personally a skeptic of the Mac’s potential, but even I have to agree, the conclusion of your title has very little correlation at all to what the data actually says. You only make yourself look silly drawing that conclusion from this data.

Next months numbers will reflect all theMAC buyers who waited for OSX Leopard.

AND … how do you account for all the People buying MACS and running VISTA under Boot Camp or Parallels. Primary purchase was the MAC but they may ‘need’ to run applications that only work on a windows platform.

Philip knows that Apple rules or he would spend his life writing about them, admit it Phil …..

“The Web metrics firm’s monthly tabulations of browser data from the sites of its 40,000 customers offer an imperfect but consistent measure of market share trends.”

Their data has absolutely NOTHING to do with “market share.” Market share is based upon sales. What they are reading is what browsers are being used by people visiting web sites. The two have nothing to do with each other. In fact, in the very article linked by “imperfect by consistent measure,” it says, “It is less a measure of market share than of active installed base.” The headline and the article are not only misleading but wrong.

If you like analogies, try this one: monitor the traffic on the Beltway around Washington, DC. Using that as a measure of the “market share” (or even “installed base”) of vehicles would be the same thing that this article does. It would grossly overestimate the “share” of trucks and underestimate the “share” of school busses.

Wow, you show some real numbers and the apple fan boys get their knickers in a wad. I find it funny that despite the 90-10 rule people still think that apple will someday rule the world. Grow up it is a nice OS, but businesses have invested decades into supporting windows and that is not going away, ever.

The stats are based on 40k clicks at sites they count. These sites vary from month to month based on what sites subscribe to their service. It looks like the mix of sites that purchase their services are moving from generic sites to sites which have more Windows users. Maybe things like shopping or news to IT services. Traffic varies according to the neighborhood. More trucks are found in light industrial areas then residential ones.

I wish I had had the extra $900 to have purchased a Mac. I love my Dell laptop (purchased last March), but MS Vista is terrible! ( I won’t use the four-lettered “S” word even though it applies completely to Microsoft Vista.) Windows 98 was the last best MS OS which I have on my 1999 HP desktop used for my writing projects.

Great… nothing like “consistently imperfect” information.

how do you even compare iphone with desktop OS?

And if it dips any more, Mac buyers are holding out for 10.5.1.

This headline is a textbook example of how statistics - in this case bleeding obvious ones - can be twisted any way you want. Really the stories are that a) Vista’s market share is growing, and b) people are buying Intel Macs.

Well du-uh! Vista is what’s in new Windows machines - so of course its market share is going to grow relative to XP - and all new Macs have Intel chips, so of course that’s what people who buy new Macs are getting.<P

There’s nothing wrong with complaining about all the hype surrounding Apple - I find it ridiculous, and I’m both a long-time Mac user and current Apple stockholder - but if that’s your agenda then it should be stated in a more straightforward way. Note that I got to this article from Yahoo Finance, where the link makes it sound like Apple is sinking.

Mac buyers were holding out for Leopard released on Oct 26.