Noise Over Mac OS Market Share "Slip"

OakDragon writes, "Mac OS market share actually slipped since last September. This reverses a trend in the winter and spring months that showed some slight growth. The actual percentage loss is small: 0.02%. But it may be significant since it follows a solid growth trend. It must be disappointing to Apple and Mac fans to see what is basically a flat line in desktop market share." Mac-oriented sites are pointing out the unreliability of the metrics from Net Applications, which are based on users of the HitsLink service.

Comments

Statistics.....

[BWJones]

I'd have to say that from my limited sampling, these numbers are very possibly off and a .2% downward change is likely statistically insignificant, especially given their sampling methods.

Traffic from my blog primarily from the US shows about 19% of traffic is from the Macintosh (200-900 unique visitors/day). Of all the traffic that hit my blog from the recent Boing Boing posting, it appears that of those that clicked through, over 23% of the clicks were from Macintosh systems and from the traffic I get from Slashdot, about 15% is from Macintosh systems. This limited sampling shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.

Traffic from another site I manage, Webvision (I know, I know, ....really old design from the early 90's, but it's been low on my priority list for the last four years) was likely the first online textbook receiving much more international traffic (about 1000 unique visitors/day from all over the world) and I have seen the international Macintosh marketshare increase from about 4% to 6.5% of total traffic over the past year.

Both of these statistics mirror the trends I have seen reported for the platforms marketshare on much wider scales. These are direct measures that I am reporting as opposed to a fee based service like HitsLink whose measures are not as direct. Too bad Google's Zeitgeist no longer reports on platform statistics which were a good measure of overall platform usage from a much wider used resource.

Nothing to see here, move along

[jmorris42]

Go dig into the numbers a bit. I'm not a Mac fanboi (see my abuse of one earlier today) but this is a non-story. The site in question is tracking Mac OS and MacIntel seperate, so of course Mac OS is dropping. Add the two together and you get a different picture. They appear not to have fixed the scripts that generate the cute graphs though, because up to now they broke out each OS variation so they could see the migration patterns in Windows versions.

Re:Macintosh = Dell PC = HP PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I just priced out a new workstation comparing the top of the line MacPro and an equivalently configured Dell. I ended up buying the 3.0Ghz version of the MacPro for $1000 cheaper than an equivalent Dell.

I'll be honest: I read that and I thought you were lying. So I went and looked for myself, and sure enough, I can't duplicate your results.

I can't get the Dell price down far enough. Only $1000 more expensive than the MacPro? The best I can do is $1500 more expensive.

Excuse me while I go and try to find all the pieces of my entire fucking worldview that you just completely shattered.

Re:Macintosh = Dell PC = HP PC

[MojoStan]

I don't know what you've been smoking but for the same price of a top-rated Mac Pro at 3GHz, you can get a 3.73GHz from Dell, so why don't you please stop spreading FUD and have a nice cup of shut the fuck up.

I don't know if you're kidding but, if you're not kidding, I'll tell you what at least 90% of Slashdot readers already know: the Mac Pro's (and Dell's) 3.0GHz Xeon (model 5160, Core Architecture) is faster (benchmarks start here) and more power-efficient than Dell's 3.73GHz Xeon (model 5080, Netburst Architecture).

I know this can be a little confusing to computer novices. The 3.73GHz Xeon is slower and uses more power than the 3.0GHz Xeon, even though they use the same socket. However, you shouldn't be talking shit, especially about a subject you know little about.