This is quite interesting. A market study shows that from the period of April 2006 to August 2006, Mac OS’s market share actually fell from 4.33% to 3.71%. And from the entire year of September 2005 to August 2006, its share went from 3.74% to 3.71%. That means it actually grew to its peak of 4.35% in December, but gradually went down as the year progressed.
What’s also interesting is that Windows XP actually rose from 76.36% to 84.18% in the same year-span. This can be explained by businesses migrating from Windows 2000, Windows 98 and Windows ME into the newer Windows XP machines, not by a loss in other competitor’s market share.
So what does this mean? It means that Macs aren’t making the huge progress that everyone previously thought they were, and they’re definitely short of the 5% figure that’s been quoted whenever people are discussing Apple’s share.
Market Share [via The Inquirer]
Well I think it might be people running windows on mac…
Like Deus Mortus I think this shows that macs are doing well but people are choosing to run windows xp on them… prime example me :) lol I purchased a MacBook pro and went out to purchase Windows XP Pro from my local computer repair shop I use OSX but I mainly choose to use windows due to the amount of programs I need to use that are not MAC OSX Compatible
full ack
yeah, this is because the recent now declared dead win98 more than win2000, belive me, i have a cybercafe/repairshop/etc and i still see lots of win2000, and people that don´t wants to buy xp just jet, much less Vista.
however just in the last month i have configured 10 machines from people who had win98 and upgraded because they recived the notification in the tray when the last update for the system went on.
About Mac osx?, hah, what more can be said that this chart don´t proves?
Xp right now is rock solid if you have it u to date.
OSS and WinXP is the mightiest of combinations.
Hah!! Mac OS has less than 4% of the market share… Mac OS fanboys like to talk a lot of smack but the all mighty dollar talks louder!
I think it could also be the fact that many people might be waiting for Leopard & updated Apple hardware to come out!!
I could be wrong.
I agree that some of the increase in Windows marketshare could stem from installs on Intel Macs, a market previously unavailable to Microsoft. However, the number of Intel Macs is only a limited fraction of the overall Mac user base and many Intel Mac users are still not running Windows (it’s a sin, you know.) so Mac-Windows can’t contribute to the differential significantly.
My guess would be (if this is a global representation) that the penetration of Windows into developing nations and third-world countries might account for some of their gains. Apple tends to cater more to the North American and European markets and the average person in a third-world country couldn’t afford a Mac system without selling off a daughter or an ox. Since these are new users to the market in most cases, the marketshare shifts in favor of Windows. This may change over time with the introduction of MIT’s $100 PC running Linux into developing nation markets.
Well, doesn’t matter what the figures say, I’m still not changing from Mac OSX or Macintosh computers. The computers are well built and last longer and the operating system is reliable and much easier to use. My time is valuable and I don’t get paid to tweak a substandard operating system. That’s the primary reason I switched the company from Windows to Macintosh. Other businesses may do that since IT support is overhead as far as I’m concerned. Mac OS support has been cheaper and the frequecy of need is significantly less.
We selected Macintosh to save money and we did.
First of all, it would be interesting to find out how they measure the market share. Seems like a somewhat dubious “study.” Second, the reason for this may be that Apple was slow in releasing an Intel successor for the PowerMac.
Quotes from an article found on coolest-gadgets.com:
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20060919/is-apple-losing-os-share/
Besides the fact that Net Applications is all jacked up over a 0.02% drop, can you really match up marketshare (computer sales) with visitor statistics solely based on HitsLink subscribers? No. Web usage by only HitsLink subscribers is just a small random sampling and has nothing to do with overall market share. Maybe Net Applications should offer to share their data with some other web traffic analyzing services before they declare the next 0.02% apocalypse.
Also, how credible is Net Applications? In the same September 18th newsletter they mistakenly reported that “iPod sales peaked at over 12 million units for the 4th quarter of 2005, but have stumbled to 8.5 million and 8.1 million units the most recent two quarters…” 12 million is close, but wrong. In Q1 of 2006 Apple sold over 14 million iPods.