Windows 7 Overtakes XP, OSX Struggles To Beat Vista

judgecorp writes "Latest market share figures show the difference between perception and reality. Windows 7 just nudged past Windows XP with both around the the 43 percent mark. OS X and Windows Vista divide the rest of the spoils, with all versions of OS X only just adding up to a little more than the failed Windows version, according to data from Netmarketshare."

Comments

Methodology?

[Danious]

Some of the history there looks a bit sus. And how much can you trust figures that give iOS 66% of the mobile OS market and Android only 21%?

Re:It's all about the mojo

[Thantik]

I actually hope this. Not because I wish Apple well being or anything like that, but I realize the hop from OSX -> Linux is a much shorter one than the hop from getting developers targeting OSX from Windows. Valve actually reused a _bunch_ of their Mac code in order to start their Linux port.

Re:Games require windows 7?

[gman003]

Let's see... Battlefield 3 is Vista/7 only, the next Call of Duty is Vista/7 only, probably more than that on the way.

Main reason is that Microsoft isn't porting Direct3D 10 or 11 back to XP - you can only go up to D3D 9. As more games are tending to use D3D10/11, the burden of adding a D3D9 renderer just for XP support increases.

And while XP and 7 may have just reached equality among the general population, gamers have upgraded far quicker. Looking at the Steam Hardware Survey, about 70% run some version of Windows 7, 13% run XP, 10% run Vista, 5% run OS X, and the rest are either already on W8 (0.25%) or "Unknown". Main reason, I think, is the prevalence of systems with >4GB of memory. 64-bit XP may have existed, but it was very rare, and had poor driver support. Vista was the first to ship with real 64-bit support, and 7 tried to make 64-bit the "default", moving 32-bit to "legacy". So all those gamers with 8-32GB of memory are running either Vista or 7.

Consoles tie into this, but in a somewhat weird way. See, the Xbox 360 is sort of halfway between D3D9 and D3D10. So as long as the game has a port to that console (or *is* a port from that console), making it run in D3D9 isn't exceptionally difficult. But as soon as the next-gen consoles hit, D3D9 (and thus, XP gaming) are toast.

Re:OS X is THE superior OS

[Osgeld]

yea I just looked at walmarts website, for 600 bucks you get a 17 inch toshiba laptop with a 2.5ghz i5 750 gig hard diskand 6 gigs of ram, meanwhile you would pay 1,200 for a 2.5 ghz i5 with 4 gigs of ram, 500 gig hard drive, 13 inch screen and a OS that doesnt run half of what people want

enjoy your logo

Re:It's all about the mojo

[_xeno_]

launchpad? shit.

I tried pulling it off the Dock on my work Mac. It added it back for me. (I have a work project that involves writing an iPad app (for no reason, mind you, other than it's a buzzword), which means I have a Mac as my work machine. In case anyone wonders why I use a Mac.)

high dpi support? in osx it's a fucking joke, it's beyond shit

If anyone doesn't believe this, you should read the Mozilla bug on getting high DPI support on Mac OS X in Firefox. Basically, it's never going to happen because the API for doing it is so fucked up. ("But isn't it just rendering things at twice resolution?" Read the bug. It isn't. There are so many edge cases it isn't funny.)

ui menus detached from apps on a big screen?

I am convinced no one at Apple has ever tried running a Mac OS X on multiple monitors. It is beyond shit at that. It basically runs on the iPad model of "one app at a time." What, you want your test app in one monitor while the debugger is in the other? Fuck you! You get one menu bar, telling which app is focused is impossible, and whichever app isn't on the "dominant" screen has the menu bar on the wrong monitor.

what's more, it's not intuitive at all! there's dozens of things in osx you just have to know, half the users don't even know wtf launchpad is.

Remember how everyone hates that Gnome 3 app launcher thing? The thing that Ubuntu started forcing on everyone? Remember how everyone hates the Metro UI, to the point Microsoft has dropped the "metro" brand? That's the fucking Launchpad. Apparently it's been decided from on high that people like losing their entire screen to a display of giant icons they can slowly scroll through to find whatever they actually wanted. Bleh.