OS X 10.9 Mavericks Adoption Continues to Grow Steadily
OS X 10.9 Mavericks continues to gain popularity, overtaking previous versions of OS X like Mountain Lion and Lion in November of 2013 according to the newest market share data from Net Applications (via The Next Web). First introduced on October 22, Mavericks is Apple's newest operating system and the first version of OS X to be released free to consumers.
During the month of November, Mavericks gained 1.58 percentage points, growing from 0.84 percent of total operating system market share to 2.42 percent, while other versions of OS X lost share. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion dropped 1.48 percentage points to 1.85 percent, while OS X 10.7 Lion dropped 0.22 percentage points to 1.34 percentage points. OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard dropped 0.07 percentage points to 1.53 percent and OS X 10.5 dropped 0.01 percentage points to 0.32 percent.
Though Mavericks market share has continued to grow steadily since its release, overall OS X market share, at 7.56 percent, remains dwarfed by Windows market share, which is at 90.88 percent with Windows 7 being the most popular Windows operating system.
While Net Applications data shows Mavericks gaining ground over its predecessors, data from GoSquared suggests that though Mavericks usage has continued to rise over the course of the last month, it is still lagging behind OS X 10.8 and OS X 10.7. According to the data, Mavericks usage is at nearly 21 percent, compared to 31 percent for 10.8 and 24 percent for 10.7.
The difference between the two measurements is likely due to the number of visitors tracked and the different sites being monitored, but both data points suggest that Apple's strategy of delivering the update free to all users has worked favorably for the company, encouraging users to upgrade to the latest software.
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Top Rated Comments
WOW! That's still a lot of people on Windows XP.
I'll admit that's what I'm still running on my Windows computer. But I rarely use it for anything...
Gary
Interesting fact #1: If you look at mobile devices only, iOS has just about twice the amount of traffic as Android.
So however many Android devices are being sold, people sure aren't using them to browse the sites I run. And it's not in any way a site that would be "iOS user oriented".
Interesting fact #2 (this is the impressive one): Windows currently has about 42% of all pageviews. iOS has about 26%. Android has about 13%. The MacOS has about 10%. Linux, other mobile platforms, and bots make up the remaining chunk.
So a full 1/4 of the traffic to a site that isn't in any way geared toward tech savvy or mobile users--it's long-form recipes, not a blog or news or tech site--is coming from iOS. And if you combine the mobile platforms, they now nearly equal Windows. Based on current trends, in a few months Android and iOS together will outweigh Windows for traffic.
Given that Windows mobile is negligible (less than 1% of traffic), I expect that kind of statistic is a big part of why Steve Balmer got canned.
Interesting fact #3: The #1 browser is Safari (since the logs don't distinguish between desktop and mobile versions). Chrome is #2.
I can remember a time not so long ago when IE made up 90%+ of pageviews to any site I ran.
Things have changed incredibly in the last couple of years, and the distinction between desktop and mobile in so many of these analyst reports simply fails to reflect the reality that, out in the real world if you're running a website, they're both just users, and the proportions are ever more in favor of people on iOS and to a lesser extent other mobile platforms.
The masses will always have the cheaper stuff. That's always been the case in any industry.