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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Some OS X facts ... and myths

I'm into facts and though Google.com is a great search engine, it doesn't have any good way to actually find out facts (like "how many MP3 players were sold worldwide in 2004?"). So everytime I see facts published, I squirrel them away for later. Here are a few stats about OS X that came from Apple at the WWDC this week:

There are 12.5 million Mac OS X users worldwide.

49 percent of these 12.5 million OS X users run OS X 10.3 "Panther." That's about 6.1 million users.

25 percent of these 12.5 million OS X users run OS X 10.2 "Panther." That's about 3.1 million users.

16 percent of these 12.5 million OS X users run OS X 10.4 "Tiger," though of course that figure will rise. Apple says it has distributed over 2 million copies of Tiger worldwide since its late April release.

10 percent of these 12.5 million OS X users run OS X 10.1.x or 10.0.x. That's about 1.5 million users.

These are the facts. Some people like to take facts and bend them a bit. For example, let's look at MacWorld assessed this information:

Twelve and a half million users may be dwarfed by Microsoft's Windows user base, but numbers are climbing - fast.

Over one million visitors go to an Apple Store each week, Jobs said. He also showed attendees a chart, a chart that claimed Apple's Mac unit sales to be climbing 40 per cent year-on-year - against an average PC market share climb of 12 per cent, Apple claimed.

Actually, that's not what Apple claimed. Jobs showed a chart discussing one particular quarter. As Steve Jobs himself said repeatedly yesterday, Apple doesn't discuss sales figures or make predictions between quarterly reports. In the last quarter in which Apple posted financial results publicly, Mac sales did grow 43 percent for the quarter year-over-year. Is that same growth occuring in the current quarter? We don't know. More important, the 43 percent growth occured this year because Mac sales were in the basement in that quarter a year ago. Stating that the "numbers are climbing - fast" is a baldfaced lie. The numbers climbed fast last quarter, but did nothing to change Apple's market share outlook. As I demonstrated here in the Nexus, Apple could sustain 40 percent growth for an entire year and would grab only 2.5 percent of the overall PC market ... assuming WinTel-based PCs grew at just 9 percent. That, too, is a fact.

[ Posted at 10:35 AM | Permalink ]