Mac hits record 7.8% market share in Net Applications survey

Die already Microsoft…

Wow, so owning an iPhone makes you a Mac user now?

Some of the sites I am running have the following OS breakdown for its visitors:
60% Windows
30% OSX
10% Linux

All sites are technology related.
I do not know what this number mean but I bet other site owners will reports similar pattern.

I just wanted to point out that of course iPhone sales have dropped the last couplle of months. Anybody that is interested in an iPhone that has a half a brain wouldn’t buy a new iPhone now when a new and improved model is due to come out any day.

The new Blackberrys have already come out and they have been really advertising like crazy, so if I was a betting nan I would guess that their sales have gone up in the last couple of months.

Last year Apple took a lot of heat on their back to school promotions from the media until the numbers came in. The only time I worry about Apple’s moves is when the media doesn’t question them. As long as the media thinks they are crazy, I know they are on the right path.

Cynik, “Sam gave the ball to Pat and me” IS correct and is better than the passive, “Pat and I were given the ball by Sam.”

I don’t know if you’re a native English speaker, but you’re wrong. Sorry.

I run vista, but usualy use Safari for browsing.

Another Big Foot in the Mouth post for PED.

It does not really matter how you want to define “market share” or any other term. As has been pointed out below (by ACW of NY), The only thing that these statistics can hope to tell us is a trend. The data have relevance ONLY in relation to previous reports. The fact that I am using 3 or 4 different browsers means little, as I will be using the same 4 browsers next month.

Even this in not conclusive however as:
1- The universe of sites that Net Applications uses is constantly changing, and
2- users change their habits at different times. For example, At christmas time people do a lot of online shopping. I suspect that they are more likely to do this from home. So this might influence the outcome.

Still - I think it shows useful trends.

—
One observation - as Window OS looses aprox half a percentage point share (of previous value), Mac OS gains roughly 5.5%. That is a big gain! (GO MAC!)

“Sam gave the ball to Pat and me.” is not ‘correct’. It sounds clumsy. A much better way to say it would be to say “Pat and I were given the ball by Sam.”

It is unusual for a person to refer to themselves in the subjective case with reference to inanimate objects, especially gifts. It is a slippery slope. You end up being with doors hitting you, your watch breaks on you, your PC refuses to tell you things, and so on.

If you’re strong enough to take the nominative, however, you run into doors, you break your watch, and you buy a Mac.

The statement further begs the question of how one ball could be given to two people, but that can’t be resolved through select grammar.

“data” is a foreign word, so you have the choice of arguing about its usage, or preferring the English equivalent.

Congrats Apple, but I think the real story here is the Linux growth. Linux desktop year over year growth is near 100%. Considering they have a huge footprint in the under-reported server market, this looks good to me.

Interestingly, there are 11 windows users per mac user and there are 11 mac users per linux user. Or maybe, I just find that interesting.

That Mac #1, PC #2 ad was for showing Mac usage in colleges, not overall market share obviously. The Mac won’t even probably crack 50% worldwide market share in 10 years if ever. I don’t care as long as their stock price keeps going up as market share gain goes up. MS investors really have nothing to look forward to since losing market share is useless for revenue gains.

“I have a Mac, that has both Mac OS and Win XP installed, and I am sure alot more people do as well, that means the percentage should add up to more than one-hundred-percent”

That is not correct. I wish people would think before posting.

This survey counts the number of web hits by each type of browser (as reported by the browser which may or may not be correct). It then totals the number of hits by each browser, then reports the percentage from each browser. Unless you can figure out a way for the sum of the individual total hits to be greater than the overall total number of hits, the percentages can not add up to more than 100%.

Mac number 1…
PC number 2.

Got to love those Apple commercials. :-)

Okay, base, share, how about happy customer numbers? or switch numbers? Point, there is little new info here. Interesting they split the iPhone since that is a full OS X using safari as opposed to the stripped windoze on the other smart(?) phones. How can they tell the difference on the iPhone?

Jose no offense, your argument makes no sense.

Private browsing does not clear the “User-Agent” field in HTTP headers.

A host firewall doesn’t normally manipulate those HTTP headers either (and they shouldn’t either).

The only way you may not be “counted” is assuming you are behind NAT and all your machines have the same browser version. Those machines may be miscounted as one machine, but still counted none-the-less.

BTW that problem exists for Windows computers behind NAT as well, so logically it means Windows users are probably heavily under counted (and assuming the current install base, they are probably under counted at a higher percentage than mac users).

By the way, I’m a mac user, in addition to a slew of other operating systems.

Datum point? The correct usage is data point as in one point of data. It kind of works like how “a game of billiards” is a “billiards game” instead of a “billiard game”. On the other hand “the data is incorrect” should be “the data are incorrect”.
“Datum point” is about as silly as saying, “Sam gave the ball to Pat and I,” instead of the correct, “Sam gave the ball to Pat and me.”

while everyone tries to argue certain points, what you are forgetting is that, the statistical numbers are rarely…check that, they are NEVER 100% accurate. We are using these information as a reference only. As long as the methods used to derive these given information stays consistent, we can sure use them, and figure out what we need to know. I have a Mac, that has both Mac OS and Win XP installed, and I am sure alot more people do as well, that means the percentage should add up to more than one-hundred-percent…go figure that out….

I really don’t care if the writer called it market share or not - it’s wrong. If they want to call it ‘web share’ or something like that, that’s fine, but there’s no reason to call it something wrong.

As a journalist, you should be checking your facts. The difference between market share and what they’re reporting has been discussed enough times that you ought to be able to discern the difference.

ex ped: Oh, was there something wrong with my facts?

Market share is NOT the same as installed base. Try taking a business course come time. Market share is short for ’share of the market’. The market is the amount of an item sold in a given time. Market share - as defined by every business text I’ve ever seen as well as every single business discussion I’ve been involved in in decades of business experience is the percentage of items sold in a given period.

Typically, market share is given as a percentage of value. For some reason, the computer industry chooses to do it as percentage of units sold. Neither one is better than the other - as long as you understand which one you’re doing. Apple’s market share as a percentage of revenue is greater than its market share as a percentage of units (even though the latter is what is typically reported for computers).

Installed base is an entirely different concept. Installed base is the percentage of the number of items in use.

This report doesn’t even technically determine installed base - unless you assume that every user of every browser and every OS platform surfs the net the same amount of time.

Please stop spreading mis-information.

ex ped: I don’t mean to bud into your interesting debate with Michael, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but I wonder if the traditional unit or revenue model of market share might not work so well on the Web. If you define market share as the proportion of the total available market segment that is being serviced by a company, then the way Net Applications measures it makes a little more sense. They look at a sample of websites as the available market and count which operating systems are servicing those sites. They call what they measure “market share,” which is why I use that term when i report their results. But what do I know? I majored in English.

RE: “… What you’re reporting is one data point …”

“Data” is plural, as in data pointS.

Datum is singular, as in datum point.

The sentence should read: What you’re reporting is one datum point.

I’m sorry but Market Share is NOT the percentage of items sold. That’s one of problems with the computer market, they treat Market Share like Sales Share. Market Share is the installed base of an item. For example, when people decide to carry peripherals of an item (such as vacuum bags), they don’t care as much about how many are being sold, but how many are in use. This is Market Share. It’s also one of the reasons why the Mac ‘Market Share’ is always reported as a little lower than it really is. To Software vendors, it is the installed base that’s important, not the Sales Share. Because Mac users purchase new machines about half as often as Windows users, it looks like the Mac ‘Market Share’ is lower than it is.

In addition, there are a great many of us Mac users that do use the Debug menu to change the header sent when using sites that say they are not compatible with Safari simply because they don’t want to bother to test it. Often, the sites work perfectly well (or with minor, inconsequential issues). Thus, us Mac users are seen as Windows users to those sites. In addition, if you look at the ‘customer’ list for the reporting, you will see a number of sites that only Windows users would go to, thus tweaking the numbers a little.

Granted the Mac true Market Share isn’t up in the high teens or twenties despite all this, but I wouldn’t be surprised that the installed base is over 10%. In addition, take away all the business machines that run nothing more than Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer and suddenly the Mac Market Share could be upwards of 15% or more.

countless personal maker(computer)use window vister and xp, you didn’t count.

They are counting browser requests, so it doesn’t matter how many Macs you have or that they are behind a home firewall. Every request carries a header identifying the browser even if you are browsing privately (that feature just avoids storing information on your computer). The only thing you could do to avoid this is using the debug menu to change the header.

Please get your terminology straight. Market share is the percentage of the market - that is, the percentage of computers sold (either in dollar or unit terms). What you’re reporting is one data point for USAGE SHARE. One can argue about which is more important, but calling this market share only clouds the issue. And I wish people would stop whining about the drop in the two previous months. If you would do a simple statistical analysis, you’d see that there was no drop after you add error bars.

Correction: … when I am on the Net, you CAN´T see me… and, at my household, there are three Macs on the Net, simultaneously, most of the times.
When my browser is requested to send a signal to your site, my computer refuses it. So, you never count me on your statistics…
Thanks.

0.51% is 51 basis points, not half a basis point.

ex ped: Thanks. Fixed now.

My friend,
You forget that most of Mac users, like myself, browse the web privatly, so, when I am on the Net, you can see me…
I, like many thousands, am not account for Net users…
Thank you!
José Novais