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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."

30 of 540 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Not everyone has the money to buy them. Sad, for them."

    That's the kind of dumb, elitist comment that shows what a tool you are. Perhaps people don't see the point in paying extortionist fees for an OS and hardware that doesn't do anything that their current OS does and is typically of lesser performance.

  2. Flamebait by Missing.Matter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it just me, or are more and more blatant flamebait stories reaching the front page recently? What actual relevant, meaningful news is contained in this story?

    Seriously, why not go full on flame and top it off with a comment on Linux's desktop share, so we can include them in the flamefest that's sure to follow? Or I guess maybe I just did that for you... you're welcome Slashdot editors.

    1. Re:Flamebait by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Informative

      >>>its cool to bash OS X / Apple here.

      False. Every time I bash Apple (mainly because it costs 2x as much) my post gets modded down into invisibility. This forum is very protective of the Apple brand and punished anybody who says something negative about it.

      As for the Article, "reality" is the same as "perception" for most people. We all know that XP is being replaced in offices/homes by Seven. That XP share is shrinking & Seven share rising is not news.

      And we all know that Apple's Mac OS is less than 10% of the market. Also not news.

      --
      My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
    2. Re:Flamebait by gnasher719 · · Score: 4, Funny

      False. Every time I bash Apple (mainly because it costs 2x as much) my post gets modded down into invisibility. This forum is very protective of the Apple brand and punished anybody who says something negative about it.

      You should go to one of the Apple vs. Samsung threads then. You will enjoy it.

    3. Re:Flamebait by SEE · · Score: 4, Funny

      Is it just me, or are more and more blatant flamebait stories reaching the front page recently?

      Yeah, it's really gotten bad the last 13 years.

  3. Year of the Linux Desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Next year...

    1. Re:Year of the Linux Desktop by Grave · · Score: 5, Informative

      Because they have no reason to. Seriously. Linux offers so little of value over Windows 7 to the average user that would justify dealing with a significant UI change and loss of support. The average user has had a hard enough time moving from XP to 7 (and these are honestly almost identical except for a couple of eye candy tweaks). The differences going over to any of the current Linux distros would be too much.

      The argument that Linux could ever take off on the desktop is based on the idea that it's equally easy to use for a complete novice. Unless you regularly deal with people who are genuinely novices, you really don't understand just how much changing things scares them. The support infrastructure for Linux on the desktop is just plain awful compared to that of Windows--OEMs do not support it except under specific circumstances, and the average neighborhood computer geek is far less likely to know how to fix an issue with Linux than with Windows.

      Converting to MacOS X happens because of marketing hype and chic factor, but at least there is a decent support infrastructure in place from Apple, and the platform is consistent and stable enough that most issues that arise can be fixed.

      Windows "just works" on almost any hardware. MacOS X "just works" on Apple systems. Linux does not, unless you are willing to do some digging.

  4. 2012 Camry over takes 2009 Camry. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Meanwhile Porsche and BMW 'have' to split the rest of the vehicles.

    Apple is rich. As in very, very, very rich. Something tells me they really don't care.

  5. Worldwide? Probably not by A+Friendly+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

    OSX isn't very used outside the western world. So, I guess it has a lower worldwide marketshare, whereas Linux might have a higher one.

    1. Re:Worldwide? Probably not by ACS+Solver · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can relate. I lived in Latvia until a year ago, and while that's a Western country by now, it's also one with much lower income levels than the "proper" Western countries, besides, the whole free market thing is kinda new there.

      Thinking about the previous 10 years or so, I think I had seen people with Macs something like 3 or 4 times total. Most people I talked to didn't even know Macs existed, although starting in 2005-2006 I met a fair amount of people who had heard of Linux as an alternative option. After moving to Sweden, I literally saw more Macs being used on my first day than I had seen in Latvia, ever.

      Also puts me in an interesting position where I'm a knowledgable computer geek and have used many OSes, but not OS X. The last time I used a Mac was with Mac OS 8, and even that was brief. I think I should just install a Hackintosh at home one weekend because I am curious to play with OS X, to see how it works and whether I'll find it as easy as it's supposed to be.

      Oh, and if anyone is curious to the reason why Macs are essentially non-existent in Latvia, it's simple - prices. Macs there cost as much as anywhere else, which in terms of Latvian incomes places them firmly in the luxury item category (especially until a few years ago). Together with the essentially ubiquitous piracy among privately owned computers, it makes the idea of buying a Mac very strange. Case in point, with iPads. Having just checked the prices, an iPad 3 with 16 GB Wi-Fi only in Latvia costs 339 lats, the same with 4G costs 425 lats (not including data plan). MacBooks start at 895 lats. The average monthly income in 2011 after taxes for those employed in Latvia was 330 lats (about 600 USD at today's rate). Puts things into perspective.

    2. Re:Worldwide? Probably not by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

      The West is a overused term. That said, I see a lot of Apple laptops here in Japan.

      Hell, you're way West from me, and I'm in Alaska. You're so West that you could be considered East.

      Now I'm all dizzy.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  6. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by ciderbrew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple also has no "non over-priced" products. I'm so bored of the what OS is better. It's a pile of files. The software you need to use is the real reason you use a computer, not because you want to use an OS. All marketing "make a demographic" back when software was in its infancy bullshit. I've got windows7 and do very little windowing.

  7. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Dupple · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is the first comment you've made on slashdot - very poor effort. It's not even good shilling.

    --
    Watch those corners
  8. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's getting to the point with you brainwashed Apple fans where I HAVE the mod points, but your post isn't even inspiring me to mod you down as a blatant shill. It's not inspiring me to do anything more than just roll my eyes and make this snarky reply, in fact.

  9. XP will continue to drop by sandytaru · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My office is no longer putting XP systems out there - any system running XP that is brought into the shop is now automatically replaced as a matter of policy (for our business clients.) Sometimes we have to twist their arms, but frankly, we've got a deadline in 2014 and we're going to make our clients meet it whether they want to or not. XP market share is likely to plummet rapidly in the next 2-3 years.

    --
    Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
  10. Methodology? by Danious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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%?

  11. Re:It's all about the mojo by Thantik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. Games require windows 7? by vlm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are there games requiring windows 7 yet?

    I upgraded from 98 to 2000 because second life required 2000
    I upgraded from 2000 to XP but I don't remember which game wouldn't work on 2000 but did on XP
    I'll upgrade from XP to ... 7? when I find a game I want requiring windows 7.... I have not run into one yet, but I'm sure it'll happen someday?

    I only upgraded to the most recent service pack of XP when I recently got the couple years old GTA IV.

    For all other activities I use my linux and mac machines, the windows PC is just for gaming.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:Games require windows 7? by gman003 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  13. trolling by jbolden · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have some questions about both the data and the summary.

    In the July to August time frame the data has 1% of the users moving to "other". I'm assuming that 1% is some mixture of Windows 8 and OSX 10.8 betas because I can't think of any other big events that happened between July and August. Which means the math is likely off in the summary.

    As an aside in the source data I have problems OSX being well above 8% (now at 12%) of sales and the figure for market share being around 6-7%. I'd love to see some breakdown that explicates the discrepancy between sales figures and usage figures when they show up, because they are rather common.

  14. The interface is not the OS by Zimluura · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think that the idea of an OS being able to be "beautiful" is sort or wonky. There is no reason such an interface couldn't run on winXP, win2k, or even somewhat in NT4, all you really need is the opengl support in the OS & drivers and you can do nifty things with alpha channel.

    I'm also not convinced apple hardware is actually high quality, it's just that their os will only install on their hardware. apple is basically like a crossbreed between dell & microsoft, and this lets them charge premium prices on their run-of-the-mill hardware because their os won't install on other (less expensive, perhaps higher quality) intel hardware.

  15. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by hazydave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    MacOS X is a taste, that's all -- neither better nor worse for everyone. Your preference.

    My 18 year old daughter has had full exposure to both Windows and MacOS X; the Windows PC on her desktop, the MacBook Pro was a loaner for the last two years at High School, part of a Communications specialty program.

    When it came time for a laptop for college, she wanted Windows. She's no computer expert, just a regular user, doing everyday stuff: games, word processing, photos, internet. And video... she liked video editing on the PC better. Largely because her Mac was just terrible at it. It didn't handle native video editing from her AVCHD camcorder, while her Windows PC did, easily. She did all her editing on the Mac in either DV (which worked dandy in any Windows editor back in the 90s) or in Apple's "iFrame" format, which is basically a chopped down qHD (960x540), I-Frame only. This is the format Apple actually "invented", since they couldn't deal with actual HD video, other than to transcode to ProRes, which they only support in Final Cut Pro (she ran Final Cut Express on the Mac).

    Tragically, the school she just went off to (Montclair University) is still using Final Cut Pro in their Broadcasting department, so they strongly recommended a Mac PC. I had found a great 3rd generation i7-based laptop from Asus: metal casework, four USB 3.0, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, 1920x1080 display, separate graphics, etc. for $1100. Having to switch to a Mac, I manged to find a slower 2nd generation i7, only two USB 2.0 + Thunderbolt (good idea, but currently fairly useless), 4GB RAM, 1600x900 display, slower separate graphics, 750GB HDD, etc. for "only" $1800. That was a factory-refurbished model (this the "discount" price), and they screwed up and delivered an 8GB unit. But seriously -- you're paying twice as much just to get MacOS. Plus, add-in the $100 extra to put Windows on the system, and, well... have to wait on that new electric guitar.

    Apple makes decent hardware. But so do many other companies -- after all, cool casework has been about the only innovation in personal computers for the last 10 years; everything else has been predictable, incremental growth. Apple's well known to be making 5x as much profit per PC shipped as just about anyone else. If you must have MacOS, it's the price you pay, but there's no basis for any technical belief Apple's making a superior product, HW or OS.

    --
    -Dave Haynie
  16. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    The software you need to use is the real reason you use a computer, not because you want to use an OS.

    I'm a kernel hacker, you insensitive clod.

  17. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Sir_Sri · · Score: 4, Insightful

    probably the same as everyone else, that windows 7 will get the job done until someone in microsoft picks a single design and sticks with it for windows 9.

  18. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Cute+Fuzzy+Bunny · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apple also has no "non over-priced" products. I'm so bored of the what OS is better. It's a pile of files. The software you need to use is the real reason you use a computer, not because you want to use an OS. All marketing "make a demographic" back when software was in its infancy bullshit. I've got windows7 and do very little windowing.

    Whats funny is that 99% of people spend 99% of their time in an application, not sitting in the operating system. Although I'm fully prepared to argue that I've used every major operating system produced in the last 20 years...and they're all pretty much the freaking same once you spend 3 days on it and get used to it.

    So sitting in safari on a mac vs chrome on windows. Office apps on a mac vs office apps on windows. Any difference at all? Really? I guess at that point you get reduced to claiming that only an apple trackpad suits you. It doesn't really, but its a fairly pathetic thing to cling to as a last ditch effort to justify the higher cost.

  19. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with your analysis is that you've put the cart before the horse. Or, more accurately, the OS before the applications.

    Your friend wants to run Adobe stuff. It runs on either OS X or Windows. She has the Windows versions. She is price sensitive. She has no major beef with her current application loader (er, OS).

    Yep, the no brainer advice is to keep her on the Windows platform. Because of the apps. (As an aside, it's a moderate PITA to switch out operating systems for Adobe Creative Suite products. Totally amazing here in the 21st Century, but there you have it.)

    But good luck finding a Dell that actually competes with an Air in terms of wieght, size and performance. Of course, if she's doing video, then she does not want an Air - she wants a fairly beefy high end laptop. A laptop that is sold by Apple, Dell, Asus, Lenovo, probably HP and bog knows who else. Your best technical advise to here would be 'you want something with a bit more horsepower than an Air - here are a bunch of choices.

    The OS is a minor issue.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  20. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by smash · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yup. The apple trackpad is worth paying for. Even if you're going to run windows on it. Carrying a mouse and keyboard around with your portable computer because the built in gear is awful is fucking retarded.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  21. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Osgeld · · Score: 5, Insightful

    yea your paying 1000$ extra for a slower machine than the walmart box

    not all of us are looking for the prettiest computer, the nicest tennis shoes and the blingiest bling

  22. Re:OS X is THE superior OS by Osgeld · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  23. Re:It's all about the mojo by _xeno_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.