“Even with the buzz surrounding Apple Computer Inc.’s move to Intel processors, the company’s share of the operating system market has remained flat since December 2005, a metrics vendor said Monday,” Gregg Keizer reports for TechWeb.
Keizer reports, “According to data gathered by Net Applications, the Mac OS in all its flavors held down 4.35 percent of the world’s operating system share in December. At the end of August 2006, it accounted for 4.33 percent… Intel-powered Macs made up a growing portion of that figure since January with 0.62 percent of all Mac systems by August — about 1 in every 7 Macs.
“‘While this slight dip may not seem to be a cause for concern for most observers, the fact that Mac usage was steadily growing until this year’s stagnation may be indicative of larger Apple problems,’ Net Applications said in a statement,” Keizer reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Anomaly. Need more input, Stephanie. Also, we need to hear from IDC and Gartner first – not to mention seeing Apple’s Mac unit shipments – before we can even attempt to divine a trend. One metric just isn’t enough in the wacky world of OS market share. We wouldn’t worry about the Net Applications’ dude’s horse hockey about “stagnation” and “larger Apple problems.” And don’t even get us started on “installed base.” FYI: How Net Applications gets their numbers is here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple Mac’s 2007 market share climb will dumbfound almost everyone, create mayhem in PC market – September 08, 2006
Apple’s Safari browser market share up 46% year-over-year – September 03, 2006
Apple gaining traction as Mac market share increases – July 31, 2006
Apple market share myths deconstructed – July 22, 2006
IDC: Apple Mac attained 4.8% U.S. market share in Q2 06 – July 19, 2006
Gartner: Apple Mac grabbed 4.6% U.S. market share in Q2 06 – July 19, 2006
‘Fantastic quarter’ helps Apple double share of U.S. retail notebook market to 12% – July 19, 2006
BusinessWeek: big market-share gains coming for Apple’s Macintosh – June 15, 2006
Analyst: Apple Mac market share primed to explode; iPod Halo Effect to become increasingly important – June 13, 2006
Does Mac market share even need fixing? – June 08, 2006
Analysts: Apple Mac market share to surge by end of 2006 – June 07, 2006
Gartner: Apple Mac market share remained relatively flat through beginning of Intel transistion – June 01, 2006
Analysts expect Apple’s new MacBook to drive market share gains in near future – May 17, 2006
This is America! We don’t need no metric system!
What? “Metrics vendor”? Well, I’m sure we don’t need that either.
Would you rather have a 90% share of a market of 1,000 units at an average price per unit of $500 or a 5% share of a 100 million unit market with an average selling price of $500. Percentages mean nothing significant unless parsed in context.
Figures Don’t Lie…But Liars Figure
Aston Martin sells a handful of cars a year and they are not worried about market share in terms of the general market. What is important is if you have enough of a market to sustain ongoing development, service, etc. Judging by the performance of the Apple Stores and the growing supply of OS X software, I don’t think that is a problem for Apple.
Everything Else Is Conversation Or Unfounded Speculation
Johnny Five!
As long as Apple is selling more computers and is remaining profitable, who cares? Seriously. Prediction: in the near future, there will be distinctions made about the types of computers sold. Cash registers and home computers will not be in the same boat.
Well surprise! In a year Apple transitioned from PPC to Intel, sales initially went down. Duh. Then they caught up like a firestorm after the release of the MacBook, which doubled Apple’s share of the laptop market in just 4 months!
What matters is not the last year, but the next year, now that the transition is complete. I think that far from spelling trouble, the fact that during this very turbulent period for the product lineup the Mac was able to hold fast is remarkable in itself.
“Net Applications” obviously don’t know quite what metric to use when they come out with stupid statements like “fact that Mac usage was steadily growing until this year’s stagnation may be indicative of larger Apple problems.” Yeah, it was indicative that form January to April, you could buy a MacBook Pro. The Mac Mini had an old PPC processor in it. Nobody was buying iBooks because they were waiting for MacBooks to arrive (whch they did in May) and the Power Macs were dying a death while everyone waited for the Quad-Xeon Pro Mac.
And still market share held firm.
What a bunch of idiots.
Considering the growth of computer use in markets like China and India (and other countries which aren’t really markets the Mac has penetrated yet), holding market share steady is actually a positive finding, as it implies that in the countries where the Mac IS marketed, market share must be increasing, on average.
“There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics”
Right, and this: Apple’s tiny market share is not ever going to increase very much – the world-wide culture is MSoft, probably 95% of PC users have no interest in switching to what they believe is a novelty system appealing to guys like “I’m a Mac” in the ads.
So, again I predict, when Vista is finally released, no matter how awful, no matter that it is an over-hyped XP upgrade, no matter all the other problems with the PC (I know them all because I’m forced to use one at my office – took almost 10 minutes to just start up this morning), MSoft will continue to rule.
“horse jockey” ?
Don’t y’all mean “horse pucky”?
people shouldn’t be allowed to make statements regarding data, until they have proven that they can consider more than one factor at a time.
Net Applications ignores that Apple just transitioned from IBM processors to Intel processors, and what affect that transition process had on unit sales.
They compare Dec 2005 with August 2006. Apple didn’t announce the Intel transition until January 2006, and began the transition with one model immediately, followed by another about 7 weeks later. During the transition period unit sales declined, BECAUSE not all models had been transitioned, including Apple’s most popular computer (until the very end of the process). They call it the ‘Osborne Effect’.
Looking at Q2/06 unit sales results you can see an immdeiate shift in volume to the transitioned products. That shift was re-inforced in Q3/06.
Q4/06 is the first full quarter with a complete lineup of Intel products. THAT is the period that Net Applications should be comparing to Q1/06. If my estimates are correct, then Mac share should increase by about 35% over Q1/06 share levels.
Nice to see that someone is claiming 4.33% of the worldwide market. The highest I had seen prior to this report was about 3.3%.
Gil, we don’t need WHAT here?
I just don’t believe those numbers. I’d like to see their methodology.
Oops.. that should have read “COULDN’T” buy a MacBook Pro, of course…
I would not put too much stock into this. The important metrics are Apple’s own sales figures, and actually industry estimates from Gartner and IDC.
Trying to determine marketshare from website traffic is open to large amounts of variances. These figures are somewhat undermined by reports on Safari marketshare figures, which was reported recently to be 3.21% in August 2006 by Net Applications itself.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/09/04/safaris-market-share-up-46-from-last-year/
It is difficult to reconcile the 46% growth in Safari from last year use with “flat Mac marketshare.”
That’s because Mac users don’t visit those crappy sites.
Hey Peterson
GM continues to put out shit and sells a lot more than BMW. So what?
Lies, damned Lies and then there is statistics.
With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome (remember Apple Lisa anyone?), Apple has never looked in better health.
After seeing so many people around me make the switch I have a hard time believing there is no growth – let alone stagnation.
Yeah, I can make up that shit too…
Data is aggregated monthly and is available to subscribers for the prior month shortly after the current month begins.
About Our Market Share Statistics
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. Safari vs. Firefox market share), search engine referral data (e.g. Yahoo vs. Google traffic market share – no MSG) 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 Mac network of small to medium enterprise Macstats customers. The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls. 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.
Unbelievably, OS X accounts for 90% of the operating system market, and Safari and Firefox count as 98% of browsers used by our Macstats customers.
The Percentage of Mac users visiting their sites hasnt changed…. who cares. The Percentage of Mac users visiting Dell’s site probably hasn’t changed much either, or Symantec’s Virus site, or WindowsDailyNews.com, or… well, you get the idea.
Only 10% of the sites they use to calcuate these stats are “content” sites, the rest are like “Search Engine Marketers” and such nonsense…
Now if these numbers came from the visitors to Yahoo, Google and so on, someone might care.
Unless they change their accounting method, in the fairly short term, we’re going to hear about Apple sales going up.
Those are more likely to be US figures than world figures. Apple’s global installed base wouldn’t be any more than 3%.
We visit sites like this one
http://www.gregpalast.com/
Everybody knows most Mac users are liberals.
we should organise a day, around the world everyone turn on their macs at the same time and let them see just what installation base we have
Why does anyone care what their OS market share is? All I know is that Apple is making record profits quarter after quarter, and they’re doing a hell of a lot better financially than Dell is these days, that’s for certain.
MacDailyNews Take: Anomaly.
How do you know, without seeing the “more input” you say you need in order to be able to make a good judgment?
Apple problems
1: Switch to Intel processors, the processor advantage of the G5 sold tons of Mac’s. Not any more.
2: The US economy and post real estate economic bubble curbing spending.
3: Microsoft Windows Vista will be just like Mac OS X and compatible with the majority of the worlds software.
4: Apple’s “Boot Camp” seen as a transition software to get Mac users trained in Windows.
5: Apple’s retarted hardware changes, AGP to PCI, then PCI to PCI-X for one generation, then all PCIe which made all other PCI cards obsolete.
6: Apple’s hardware more expensive in some cases, poor value for money spent for some. Especially laptops.
7: The heat, the awlful heat!
8: Apple’s lack of options, no broad range of hardware and prices. No PDA or inexpensive laptop.
9: The revolting against the “Cult of Apple”, overmarketing.
10: BlueRay / HD-DVD jury still out to lunch.
11: Trusted Computing and all that it entails discouraging pro use of hardware.
12: Apple is pursuing the small and limited consumer market, spending a lot of effort to sell one or two machines to a customer, when in big buisness one person can sign off for thousands of machines with one stroke of a pen.
“Apple’s retarted hardware changes”
’nuff said
MDN, why are you wasting bandwidth on this dreck? Seriously, got nothing better to do?
Intel-powered Macs made up a growing portion of that figure since January with 0.62 percent of all Mac systems by August — about 1 in every 7 Macs.
.62% of all Mac systems? That would be a couple thousand, all told. I’m pretty certain that more than .62% of all Macs currently in use are Intel-based. And … what’s this “1 in 7” trash about? .62% is about 1 in 160! Move the decimal point and you still have 1 in 16! OK, I might buy that 1 in 7 Macs currently in active use are Intel-based. But. That isn’t what the excerpt says. And, based on the excerpt, I’m not clicking over to the full article!
That goodness Apple has the iPod!
People have a LOT invested in PPC hardware that they haven’t gotten full use out of.
Look how many changes Apple went through recently.
OS 9 to Mac OS X, X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4 and soon X.5
G4 to G5 processors, the new “bad ass” processor. Quickly to be dropped for lousy Intel processors that really just only have caught up with the G5 in performance.
We will see a new surge in buying of Apple pro hardware when the Dual Quad monsters arrive. But right now the whole Blue Ray / HD-DVD thing is still being waged.
PPC G5 machines are doing the job nicely for most consumers and pro use, which took the expensive plunge from their OS 9 and G4 machines.
Now Apple is doing another radical change, to Intel processors and Mac OS X.5
People are just going to wait, wait to see if it’s worth it or if Windows Vista should be their next hardware choice.
Apple needs to come out with a new hardware/software advantage over Microsoft, or suffer erosion of market share again.
Apple may be selling more, but the Windows guys are selling even more percentage wise than Apple.
And wait until Vista comes out – lots of new Windows computer purchases coming!
Plus everytime a Mac owner buys a copy of Windows XP to run on his/her intelMac it negates the purchase of the Mac OS.
“With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome “
Worse disasters than what? There is no disaster.
DLMeyer:
What you said.
I read, re-read, and re-re-read that sentence to see what I was missing.
We’re not missing anything. Those folks just aren’t very good with numbers.
Next.
Hmmmm, did anyone really read where they get their data from.
From what I can tell, they look at commercial sites and see who is visiting their specific customers. Most of the visitors are commercial sites, and others govt. etc. Very few seem to be just people.
Yes, companies are still buying mostly PCs. Real people are the ones buying macs.
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JMHO.
N.
First of all, almost every commenter on this page is completely misinterpreting the figures, including the MDN take, which refers to ‘installed base’ as a counterargument.
These aren’t market share figures. They are OS share figures — based on browsing frequency. Which means: installed base.
Score one for Net Applications against almost the entire MDN crowd.
Reading comprehension is really down in these parts.
Of course, the selection of website logs used to determine these stats is vitally important to whether or not they are biased, but without actually knowing what those websites are, the argument that they are biased is pure speculation based on suspicion and prejudice, isn’t it? So score .5 for Net Apps and .5 for the MDN crowd on that one, because you rabid skimmers (READ next time sheesh) have a point but it’s hypothetical.
Final score: Net Apps 1.5. MDN 0.5.
You lose.
Oh, and BTW, I wouldn’t count on market share figures or any kind of figures taking off anytime soon just because the ‘transition is complete’, because of three little words…
NO NATIVE PHOTOSHOP
Here is a better way to see the stats from Market Share –
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2
Note that Mac OS and MacIntel are listed as separate systems –
August 2006 –
Mac OS – 3.71%
MacIntel – 0.82%
total – 4.53%
January 2006 –
Mac OS – 4.21%
MacIntel – 0.00%
total – 4.21%
Going back a full year –
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=2&qpmr=15&qpdt=1&qpct=3&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=80
Mac OS – 3.74%
The Market Share web site shows Apple’s share is increasing. The “dip” cited in the article apparently referred to PowerPC-based Macs only, without factoring in the increasing sales of Intel-based Macs.
My August 2006 numbers were incorrect, they should be –
August 2006 –
Mac OS – 3.71%
MacIntel – 0.62%
total – 4.33%
Still, it shows growth for the Mac platform.
All I know is the new Apple Store in Norfolk has been unbelievably crowded. I went the second day it was open last Sunday and arrived at the store at 12:05pm. The mall opened at 12:00pm. There were at least 100 people in there when I arrived. Five minutes after it opened! I went back yesterday at it was crowded again.
So this statistic is based on Web Browsers, not OS. I have Safari identify itself as I.E. for all the morons who used Microsoft tools to build their websites. How many Mac users are using Firefox, iCab or disguised Safari? What a useless statistic. No wonder this country appears to be losing it’s technological edge. All our statistical analysis and engineering is being done by accountants, lawyers amd MBAs.
Roughly Tied, Severly Struck,
“Now Apple is doing another radical change, to Intel processors and Mac OS X.5
People are just going to wait, wait to see if it’s worth it or if Windows Vista should be their next hardware choice.
Apple needs to come out with a new hardware/software advantage over Microsoft, or suffer erosion of market share again.”
WTF???? What are you talking about? I can guarantee you that the vast majority of people who own PPC Macs will not switch to Vista. When their PPC Macs get old they will update to the latest Mac hardware. The only reason to updgrade is if you really need to and a relatively new PPC set up isn’t ready to be upgraded yet in most situations. You are troll, get lost.
All I know is the new Apple Store in Norfolk has been unbelievably crowded
This is just a clever marketing tactic.
Apple knows by zip code of it’s customers where to open a Apple Store so that it appears to remain busy.
Since Apple sells mainly to consumers, for each piece of hardware sold has a body attached to it.
Now on the other hand a Dull salesman can go visit one man at Crispy Chips Inc. behind closed doors and sell 1000 POS Windows boxes in one morning.
Want to give Linux a try on your PPC Mac?
It’s so frigging easy to create a “Live CD” and boot off of it. Nothing will be changed on your hard drive.
There is lots of free software and you can use a USB flash drive to store files on.
It’s just interesting to mess around with.
All you do is download the ISO and
Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)
Drag the ISO to the sidebar of the Disk Utility main window.
Select the ISO where you just dragged it, and choose (Menu > Image > Burn…)
Insert a blank CD > Burn.
Reboot and your up in Linux.
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It’s no Mac OS X, but it can be useful to take with you.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
An interesting site to see the visitor stats on would be iTunes… how many Windows vs Mac users are there going to iTunes to buy songs? Or download updates?
Yes, only iPod owners will likely go to iTunes, and they’ll probably be home users, but isn’t that who iLife is aimed at anyway? Apple have given up on the business world more or less, so what’s Apple’s non-business market share worth?
“This data is derived by aggregating the traffic across our network of websites that use our service”.
Okay, and there websites cater to Windows users so they automatically declare that OSX market share is flat. How can this be a true indicator of OS market share? It can’t, and this is a bogus story about nothing and only half of the facts if that.
“Want to give Linux a try on your PPC Mac?
It’s so frigging easy to create a “Live CD” and boot off of it. Nothing will be changed on your hard drive.
There is lots of free software and you can use a USB flash drive to store files on.
It’s just interesting to mess around with.
All you do is download the ISO and
Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)
Drag the ISO to the sidebar of the Disk Utility main window.
Select the ISO where you just dragged it, and choose (Menu > Image > Burn…)
Insert a blank CD > Burn.
Reboot and your up in Linux.
It’s no Mac OS X, but it can be useful to take with you.”
GODD GRIEF, WHY?!!!
You can just click on “terminal” and have a REAL unix command line environment instead of an AMATEUR, WANNABE version of unix. SHEEESH!!!
So the numbers are derived from web browser traffic? Good grief! How many Safari users have Safari identify itself as IE to accomodate all the retarded web developers out there who lazily use .NET? How many Safari users have simply blocked pop-ups and eliminated scads of commercial sites from their browsing? How many OS X users use Firefox instead of Safari? These numbers are crap.
There is no disaster
With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome (remember Apple Lisa anyone?), Apple has never looked in better health.
Macromancer:
“With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome “
Worse disasters than what? There is no disaster.
The original by CC:
With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome (remember Apple Lisa anyone?), Apple has never looked in better health.
The only disaster in Macromancers post was in the editing.
Good way to take everything out of context and make it say whatever you want.
Perhaps you should have used your Oliver Stone nickname.
CC says: “With 30 years of going out of business under their belt, and way worse disasters than this having been overcome (remember Apple Lisa anyone?), Apple has never looked in better health.”
I agree with you that Apple is in no danger of blinking out, but I don’t think that was the gist of the report. Only that Apple sales dipped in 05, after they had been climbing, and that they may – may – be climbing again. So in retort to your statement; yes, Apple has looked in better health. It was before the Intel transition. Everything saleswise was on an upward trajectory, and margins were greater b/c the PPC hardware they were using was cheaper to make than the Intel stuff they have now.
The latter is evident if you just check out the prices for FBDIMMs and the class of Intel procs Apple is using. Even with steep discounts from Otellini, there is no way Apple is beating the per unit CPU costs it was getting from IBM & Freescale, or the much lower price for DDR2. That factored into a sales stall equals money down the drain.
Why else do you think the prices of iPods didn’t come down with these recent updates, even though the costs of the materials to make them has dropped DRAMATICALLY in the last year? Apple’s historic behavior in such circumstances was to pass along some of that savings to the consumer, if for no other reason than to keep their foot on the throats of their competitors. Thus Apple once contented itself with healthy 40-50% margins with iPod, and let price’s reflect the lower costs of manufacture (if there was any). Yet, now those margins are up into the 80% range. Hell, the 8GB Nano is the exact same price as the 30GB iPod! There’s no way they’d be doing that with a major effort by M$ coming this Xmas (Zune) unless they’re profit margins were really hurting elsewhere (and for Apple, the only other elsewhere is iPod hardware sales).
From the article: “the Mac OS in all its flavors held down 4.35 percent of the world’s operating system share in December. At the end of August 2006, it accounted for 4.33 percent… Intel-powered Macs made up a growing portion of that figure since January … – about 1 in every 7 Macs.”
And yet overall the numbers are still down from the year previously.
“‘While this slight dip may not seem to be a cause for concern for most observers, the fact that Mac usage was steadily growing until this year’s stagnation may be indicative of larger Apple problems,’ …”
How much of a problem it is will be determined, but it certainly indicates a loss of revenue in computer sales, no matter how you slice it. The Osbourne Effect happened, the Photoshop Conundrum is still a fact, and higher prices for their hardware is like a slow leak in the balloon (not crucial right away, but a ‘flat tire’ is inevitable unless addressed).
It’s all right there to see, folks – just get the RDF out of your eyes.
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“… (and for Apple, the only other elsewhere is iPod hardware sales).” should read:
“(and for Apple, the only other elsewhere is computer hardware sales).”
whoops
I have no proof whatsoever and also not in denial, but arent computer usage on the up and up all the time all over the world? For example developing countries like China and India are probably expanding the market like crazy, so if Mac market numbers are staying put, does that actually mean Mac usage is up? hehe I’m probably wrong …
I am guessing most people and companies in these places start off with Windows (pirated or legit) or maybe Linux. I think most folks on these parts are mostly interested in budget whitebox pcs, lets face it there are no budget low spec Macs, like there are no budget BMWs.