Apple's Mac OS Market Rises to 5.39 Percent - Up 31 Percent Year Over Year

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Apple's Mac OS Market Rises to 5.39 Percent - Up 31 Percent Year Over Year

Dec
01

By: switchtoamac at: 6:23 AM on December 1, 2006 | Comments (9)

Apple's Mac operating system market share continues its upward move and data in for November 2006 demonstrates that it has risen 31 percent year-over-year from November 2005 to November 2006. Data rounded to the nearest whole percent, actual rise is 31.1 percent.

Please note that this does not mean that Apple's market share is 31 percent. The number represents percent increase. Data used in this post has been obtained from market research firm Net Applications (Market Share). The total Mac OS X market share number comes in at 5.39 percent.

Based on the firm's calculations the following metrics can be calculated.

Key Percent Increases

Up 58.1 percent since January 2005
Up 53.1 percent since April 2005 (Mac OS X Tiger launched April 29, 2005)
Up 28.0 percent since January 2006
Up 3.5 percent since October 2006
Up 14.2 percent since September 2006

The November 2006 Key Percentages outpaced the growth reported for October 2006 which were as follows:

Up 52.8 percent since January 2005
Up 48.0 percent since April 2005 (Mac OS X Tiger launched April 29, 2005)
Up 23.8 percent since January 2006

Below is an updated view of Apple's Mac OS market share month by month for calender year 2006 up to and including November 2006. Pay careful attention to the numbers because Market Share splits Mac operating system data into two groups, Mac OS and MacIntel. MacIntel represents Intel builds of Mac OS X Tiger. Have a look at the November 2006 data. Mac OS is reported to have 4.10 percent of the operating system share while MacIntel is reported to have 1.29 percent operating system market share. When the numbers are combined, we get the following (Internet Explorer users may have difficulty viewing the images. If so, click 1, 2, 3). You can click on each image to get a larger view:

Mac OS X Intel Posts 15.2 Percent Increase In One Month
The data shows that Mac OS X Intel experienced a 15.2 percent increase as it's share rose from 1.12 percent in October 2006 to 1.29 percent in November 2006.

Growth Continues but Slows
November experienced a slowdown in it's monthly change versus the prior four months. November marked the first month in the past five where growth did not accelerate however, the monthly change still grew by a respectable 3.5 percent. It's just another indication that the number of Mac users has expanded in the past month. Apple Computer is now in the midst of the 2006 holiday buying season.

About Market Share
The following is taken from the Net Applications site:
"This data provides valuable insight into significant trends for internet usage. These statistics include monthly information on key statistics such as browser trends (e.g. Internet Explorer vs. Firefox market share), search engine referral data (e.g. Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google traffic market share) and operating system share.

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers. The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls and growing. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis"

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9 Reader Comments

THE ANTIMAC on: December 1, 2006 1:19 PM said:

Since when are url hits a market? Idiot.

BEORN BEORNSSON on: December 1, 2006 6:15 PM said:

And since when does a subset get added to the set

switchtoamac on: December 1, 2006 9:40 PM said:

BEORN,

If you took the time to read the data, you'd realize that Market Share breaks down OS X into Mac OS X and MacIntel. The URL to get to the data is referenced in the article.

Ragnar on: December 2, 2006 4:53 AM said:

Web statistics are a great way to measure actual usage of computers. In fact, they are far better indicator of the usage, than the traditional measuring of market share. For hardware makers, computers sold matter, for the rest - web statistics give more valuable information and may actually be closer to the meaning that most people give to market share. So, I take my hat off for the author! Thanks.

Han Solo on: December 2, 2006 8:15 AM said:

Ever wonder what the Apple marketshare is for HOME/Consumer PC's?

Well...here we go lets calculate it.

1) Apple has 5.39 % of TOTAL PC market.

2) Home/Consumer PC's are 10% of the Total PC Market. Source: ZDNET 7/2006. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6092226.html

so...lets do the math again..

5.39/10 = 53% total of HOME PC Marketshare.

Really....FIFTY THREE PERCENT of the home pc market?

Wow..thats amazing if its really true....it is so hard to get numbers of the HOME/Business PC market breakdown though.

Porter Poole on: December 2, 2006 10:15 AM said:

Wow, Han Solo, your math is really bad.

guest on: December 2, 2006 5:32 PM said:

That would only be true if apple sold 0 machines in the business and education markets

Mark Fischer on: December 2, 2006 6:19 PM said:

Bet it does not count those whose use nin-apple intel PC's to run OS X...

Dell Inspiron makes a nice platform for OS X 10.4.8. (as long as you don't close the lid...)

Dirty Hairy on: December 2, 2006 10:33 PM said:

I never did like web stats to measure market share... and here's why: there are huge numbers of sites that aren't platform agnostic (meaning WinIE specific). All of the Mac users I know -never mind the legions of *nix users- are aware of this, and have successfully visited these same sites by browser spoofing. They also usually recommend this technique to Mac noobs who suddenly can't get to sites they used to visit when they were on Windows.

Naturally, this skews the results in favor of WinIE. Now, based on the sample size, it's hard to tell how many percentage points this would swing in favor of Mac Market Share

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Apple's Mac OS Market Rises to 5.39 Percent - Up 31 Percent Year Over Year

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