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Mac Install-Base Shown to Be 16%
Kelly McNeill writes "MacDailyNews has an editorial which summarizes reports from various research groups that analyzed the number of computer users affected by viruses. The conclusion was that 16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs. The lack of viruses on a Mac is commonly known, but the interesting thing is the fact that the results finally provide the first set of conclusive numbers which illustrate the Macintosh's install-base. So far only "market-share" statistics are commonly published for the public and do not convey install base. (If for example 2 people are using computers and one replaces his 2x in a 3 year period and the other only does once, market-share dynamics dictate that one demographic has 75% market share while the other has only 25% -- even though install base is still 50/50.)"
Hmm, the summary of the article seems to include more facts than the article itself. The summary makes a big point of how TFA's 16% number if found from the virus infection percentage. TFA doesn't say that's where the 16% comes from at all. All the article body says is "In addition, the Software Publishers Association (SPA) estimates that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs." The headline says that 16% of users aren't infected because they use Macs, but it doesn't explain that or justify it. Besides, even if the summary was correct, then this would seem a very poor way to guess at install base. The browser's "user agent" header sent to a general interest site like Google would seem a far better way. Admittedly that would be skewed by Mac users using being "forced" to access Google from Windows in a work environment, but still. That seems like it would have to be more accurate than the approach hinted at in the summary. In searching for google stats on this I found on the Mac Daily News site a discussion which included this very topic when the issue of install base was previously discussed there.
Don't vote for Eugene Papansanovich for Congress!
My web site's stats are 1-3% MacOS ( all version ). Even that figure is blown up a bit since a couple of webmaster's use Macs.
:
Anyway full stats
Windows XP 495 60.37%
Windows 98 117 14.27%
Windows 2000 85 10.37%
Windows ME 41 5.00%
Other 22 2.68%
Linux 21 2.56%
MacOS X 13 1.59%
Windows 95 11 1.34%
MacOS PPC 6 0.73%
Windows NT 4 0.49%
Windows 2003 4 0.49%
Windows 1 0.12%
Total 820
Lima India November Uniform X-ray
One of them is AT&T Natural Voices coming soon for Apple Mac OS X
So cheer up, they only count people buying software, thus most Linux users don't show up hereLars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
if i had to guess, it would be that the parent is from the US, and the grandparent is from Australia or the UK. in those countries, the "6 monthly" formulation is the norm for every six months. having been a visiting physician in papua new guinea (ex-australian protectorate) i had to get used to a medication dosage schedule of "6 hourly" meaning once every six hours and not six every hour.
just FYI
Fermat's other theorem: "I have a simple proof, but I can't write it down as I fear it's a DMCA violation to discuss it"
TheCounter shows just 2% usage share for Mac OS. Combined with the 1-2% usage share for Safari reported by OneStat and 1-2% "other" browser usage reported by WebSideStory, it's hard to believe Mac OS has 16% of the installed base of desktops. Maybe the vast majority of Mac users don't use pre-installed Safari, or haven't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, or just don't browse the web nearly as much as other OS users?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yes. Your first statement should be:
- The vast majority of studies estimate the marketshare of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
- One study estimates it (installed base) at sixteen percent.
There is a difference between installed base and marketshare.
If a PC user buy a new PC every other year and a Mac user buy a Mac every four years, you would see that the PC has 60% marketshare, but the installed base is still really only 50%.
Given that Mac users have claimed, for a while, about how long they last (a combination of higher price and higher satisfaction, I'm sure, in that they can't afford to buy a new Mac every other year, and that when they bought it in the first place it met their needs to the point that they didn't need to buy or upgrade a couple years later because it was slow or unsatisfying or virus infected), it wouldn't surprise me if Mac users replaced their Macs every 8 years while PC users have traditionally replaced their PCs every 3.
GPL Deconstructed
Try using a non-IE browser that identifies itself as non-IE (and doesn't include MSIE in it's useragent string) on the Hoyt's movie sites here in Australia. Or the old St George internet banking site.
Lots of sites use the useragent string to "identify" the browser. Then they serve up a, "your kind not welcome here" message if you're not MSIE-useragent-compliant or at least Mozilla-useragent-compliant. There's a reason that OmniWeb reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh;
U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/125.4 (KHTML, like Gecko, Safari) OmniWeb/v5
63.42" and Safari reports itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/412 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/412"
It's not that the sites are coded explicitly for Internet Explorer - the sites work (mostly) on other browsers, but the people who wrote the site were only willing to test on the most common browser, and therefore reject other browsers. Now the sites are doing two-browser checking, but they're still checking based on UserAgent, not JavaScript capabilities, which means that when the next version of the browser comes out the site will again be inaccessible.