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About this siteFor 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 Sunday, January 25, 2004Mac market share vs. usage shareUPDATE: I had a cute little math error in the original posting, so I've fixed that. Sorry for any confusion...A reader wrote me a note this morning about measuring the actual number of Mac user out there. Here is my reply. Market share is only ever defined as sales. That can be for a quarter, or, more commonly, the most recent yearly figure. The Mac's worldwide market share is 1.88 percent (not 1.18 percent) based on PC and Mac sales information for 2003 provided by IDC and Apple Computer. However, the other interesting figure you're alluding to is "usage share" (actual people using actual systems) and this one is wide open for debate. Here's how I look at it. According to Apple, the Mac purportedly has 25 million "users" but that figure has always been suspect, and hasn't changed a bit for several years (making it further suspect). However, thanks to Apple, we do know that there are (again, supposedly) 10 million Mac OS X users, or will be soon. (Why supposedly? Because most Mac OS X users have purchased OS X several times each, either with a new Mac--most Mac users buy many Mac over the years--or with each OS X revision at retail--OS X 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3). OK, whatever. We'll accept the 10 million figure, as it's as close to accurate as we'll ever see. Now. How many PC users are there? We know there are about 150 million to 200 million people using Windows XP, but that doesn't mean much. We need to know how many non-Mac users there are in the world. Is it 700 million? 1 billion? 1.5 billion? It could be much higher. Heck, it's definitely much higher. It would be interesting see what the figure really is, not that we'd really be able to find out. But let's say it's 1 billion. If there are 1 billion PC users worldwide, and 10 million OS X users, what is the Mac's usage share? It's one-percent (1 percent). Not a huge number. Or we could use the whole (admittedly completely bogus) 25 million figure. Then, the Mac's share is 2.5 percent. Either way, if you're a Mac fan, you really don't want to go there, I guess. But that's why people stick with market share, even though that number is so hotly contested by the Mac advocates. Usage share is even uglier. Another way to look at this, I guess would be just to stick to the US. There are only so many people in the US, and only so many of them use computers. And Mac's market share in the US is higher than it is worldwide, which makes sense when you consider how wealthy this country is compared to much of the world. I seem to recall that the Mac's market share in the US for 2003 was somewhere around 3.5 percent. I'm sure this figure is less troubling to many people than 1.88 percent (or, ahem, 1 percent, both of which are far closer to reality). [ Posted at 10:26 AM | Permalink ]
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