How is Mac Os Ten King of beasts doing?

Rival metrics firms paint unlike pictures of Lion adoption

Senior Reporter, Computerworld |

Adoption of Mac Bone 10 10.vii, also known as Lion, has stalled, according to statistics from online ad analytics company Chitika.

"Lion'south adoption rate has been less than stellar, to say the least," Chitika reported in a weblog post Friday, citing data that showed Lion was simply the third-nigh-popular of all Mac editions with a 16% share, behind both OS X 10.half dozen (Snowfall Leopard) with 56% and 10.5 (Leopard), with 22%.

Chitika claimed that Lion'south adoption rate dramatically slowed during September and October, with increases in those months of just one-4th that of Baronial.

Apple, however, has touted King of beasts'south success several times since its July launch, proverb in early October, for instance, that the new operating system had sold 6 million units, nearly double the number of copies sold of Snow Leopard during a similar flow in 2009.

Just Chitika's numbers are contested past another metrics firm, Net Applications.

The California-based Spider web measurement visitor had Panthera leo in second place among all Mac operating systems during Oct, with a 26.4% share of the Mac market, more than than 10 points higher than Chitika. In Cyberspace Applications' estimates, Snow Leopard powered 52.ane% of all Macs, while Leopard accounted for 16.five% last month.

While Net Applications also noted a slowdown in Lion'due south adoption pace over the concluding two months, the growth decline was much less meaning than Chitika claimed.

According to Net Applications, Lion gained 4.eight per centum points in September and iv.5 points in Oct, or about half every bit much every bit in August, when Lion jumped past 11.5 points.

Nigh of the gains by King of beasts have been made at the expense of Snow Leopard, Lion's precursor. Snow Leopard, which launched in 2007, has lost only about ane-fourth as much share as Snowfall Leopard since July.

That's no surprise, every bit Snow Leopard fabricated upwardly the bulk of all Mac operating systems prior to Lion's launch, and Apple made information technology more difficult and expensive for Leopard users to update to Lion. Another contributing factor is that Lion, like Snowfall Leopard before information technology, won't run on older Macs equipped with PowerPC processors.

The unlike results posted by Chitika and Net Applications are likely due to the different ways each collects, and then calculates share.

Internet Applications, for case, gathers unique visitor data from tens of millions of users each calendar month who visit an estimated 40,000 websites. It also weights the data to account for the relative lack of insight into people browsing from some countries, China included, that have large pools of computer users.

In Net Applications' methodology, each Chinese visitor carries more than weight than a respective user in the U.S. simply because there are relatively few Chinese users amid its data. Combined with Prc's larger Net-using population, that means one Chinese Mac user can swing the share results more than dramatically than tin can 1 user in the U.S.

Cathay has been a hotbed for Apple lately: In the quarter catastrophe Sept. 30, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan together accounted for 16% of all Apple'southward revenues. Chinese buyers accept been especially taken with the new MacBook Air, which went on auction there merely over ii months agone.

The Air, like any new Mac sold in the U.S. since mid-July, is equipped with Mac Bone X Lion.

OS X chart
Co-ordinate to Net Applications, Lion powered more than than one-fourth of all Macs last month.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general engineering science breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His east-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

Senior Reporter Gregg Keizer covers Windows, Office, Apple tree/enterprise, web browsers and web apps for Computerworld.

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