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

w3schools.com backs you up.

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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). ... shows a steady increase in the percentage of Macintosh users that have visited over the past few years.

They were actually reporting a 0.02% change, which most people would consider noise. Claims of accuracy to the five places are silly, unless you have millions of hits.

w3schools.com OS index shows a growth in share for September of 0.2%, though they have a less generous estimate of 3.8% total share.

Everywhere I look, I see more people using Mac and Linux. It's hard to believe the combined share is less than 1 in 10.