Mac market share slips worldwide Although Apple may seem to be riding an unending wave of success after success, a new study shows that its worldwide market share is slipping. "Mac usage share globally has been in a slow decline over the past several months," say the analysts at NetMarketShare, "dropping below 5 per cent in October." Worldwide operating- …
The Mac slippage undoubtedly is not the only thing on Jobs' mind: for in 2010 Q3 Android was on 40% of smartphones sold.
Analyst group NPD just said 44% of all smartphones sales in the US Q3 were Android OS based, which is an 11% increase over Q2. Not withstanding Jobs' hype about the Iphone 4, iOS accounted for only 23%.
Looks like nothing much will change in Q4, either. NPD claims that Apple's market share dropped 21% in the last 12 months.
Jobs' old nemesis, Creative, has just come out with 7" and 10" Android 2 pads, base models start at £199/£180 respectively.
So much for Jobs' claim that open systems don't always win, and as with the claims of many false prophets, things ain't necessarily so.
2011 should see Apple's iOS complementing the Mac in the slow decline.
More likely to be on Jobs' mind: iPhone sales are up 95% year on year. If he worries about them at all, then probably the observation that the lion's share of Android growth is at the expense of RIM and Symbian makes him feel better.
Or, given that it's a business, if we expand to look at all mobile phones rather than just smartphones (putting all of the iPhone, Android, etc in a tiny minority position), then Apple's ability to wring a 39% of all industry profits from just 2.8% market share probably makes him able to sleep at night.
Further entries at the wafer-think profit end of the market are unlikely to worry him, as are your invented or misunderstood statistics. Per the NPD press release used by this story (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_101101.html): "Apple iOS held relatively steady versus last quarter, rising one percentage point to 23 percent;". That's up 1% from 22% share last year. They most recently commented on the Mac in May as far as I can make out, reporting that Mac sales were up 39% year on year for January and February (secondary source only, sorry: http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/15/npd-mac-sales-up-39-percent-in-january-and-febuary-as-ipod-sale/).
So, the headline is: in the real world, more than one technology-deliminated group can do well at the same time. Who'd have thought it?
>erm is that apple with 14.17% of the world wide market ... what was the issue?
Their share is less than half that, even if you group iOS and OSX....and the issues are presumably that their market share is dropping and turnover/profit barely puts them in the top 200 listed companies while their market cap is topping out.
Question is will the stock gently drop to a realistic level over the next few months, or freefall after some impending disaster like poor Xmas returns, a big settlement to Nokia or SJ's medical status getting leaked...
All the desktop operating systems are dropping share. They're being swept away by the mobile tide.
Look at the trend on that site for the last year. Windows down 1.12% from peak, Mac OS down 0.33% from peak, Linux down 0.27% from peak.
Now the real question is just who is leading the charge on all this mobile web usage? Whoever it is, they must be doing rather well for themselves.
I think it would be very interesting to see figures like this broken down in much more detail; US vs rest of world is interesting for showing how skewed the US market is (particularly in mobile), but not for much else.
Comparing market penetration vs GDP per head, for example, might reveal whether Apple does better in wealthier countries like the US and UK, compared to others, and if Linux is more popular in the less well off nations. Or it may indeed prove that's not actually correlated.
In many countries in the developing world, a mobile is the main means that a lot of people use to get online, so perhaps looking at platform penetration based on other metrics would be revealing too, like broadband or fixed line penetration, percentage of urban population and so on.
It's far too easy to get caught up in the shiny gadgets that are taken for granted in Europe and the US and assume that everyone aspires to an iPhone, along with associated iTunes computer to manage it, or to a desktop PC at all.
But that's simply not true for a large number of people, for whom something like one of those budget Nokias that it's fashionable to sneer at, with Opera and Nokia Money is a far more rational proposition than Android, iOS or any sort of PC.
And, of course, the use case of those people is likely to be very different - far more finding out about stock (that's animals) prices than looking up celebrity skirts. Whether that sort of internet usage will be tracked to the same extent as ours is also an interesting question.
How well the Mac is doing it markets where it should be doing well is more important. We from this information that usage is increasing in the US but what about other markets where OSX should do well (thinking the major first world economies - Europe, Australasia and so on).
But I would like to back this up by saying at my office we are an Adobe shop running on Wintel. This is not some fanboy reaction but our editors and post guys really like the fact that our IT guy can custom build edit decks to their liking in the world of Windows - within budget of course. So we have an ATI (AMD) guy in one office and an Nvidia gal in the other and we can make them both happy. Can't really do our preferred level of customization on the Mac - and that's that.
But we have the hardest time with the interns because they all come out of college with the 'They told us final cut pro was the only editor in the world" line. Sorry kids that's just not the case. Premiere is much hated but it comes with the All Mighty After Effects and Photoshop. So we go with that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/wtf_32.png
Your school boards in the UK must be very different from the US !
Here they're only concerned with stretching a dollar, far from forcing Apple products on pupils.
That's why we have so many, many Dells (and IT staff to keep them running.) Amazing, the fiddly things that go wrong.
The Macs are in the Photography and Final Cut Pro lab where one guy keeps the screens polished.
If only we had more of these Apple shills you describe...
I prefer Statcounter: It gives raw data based on something a little bit more then 16 billion tracked hits that's 100 times as much as Netmarketshare. It gives a different story, 11/009 mac os share: 4.96% 10/10 6.05%.
Linux from 0.72% to 0.77%. But I think Linux share is underestimated (doesn't privoxy blocks cookies/webbugs?). Btw, ie 10/2010 49.25% marketshare.
As I think on it, there was a similar claim of Mac usage slipping a few months ago.
The Windows crowd was all excited.
Until somebody pointed out that the "dip" began with the release of the iPad.
And that if you add the numbers up in a spreadsheet, (which I did), combining the Mac and iPad data, the "dip" vanished into a steady upward growth line, consistent for over a year back.
Which of course implies that Mac browser usage only went down because Mac users were browsing the net with iOS devices like iPads, iPhones, and iPods.
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