Mac 'market share' hits record 8.28%
The presence on the Internet of both the Mac and the iPhone grew smartly this summer, registering record numbers for each operating system in the Net Applications survey issued overnight Wednesday.
The Mac's share of Web hits grew 5.34% to a record 8.28% last month, according to the Web metrics firm's September survey. The iPhone's share, having surged 57% — from 0.19% to 0.30% — in August (see here), grew another 6.67% to hit 0.32% in September.
These monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to websites operated by Net Applications' clients. Although the company describes the results as “market shares,” Net Applications does not actually measure share of market in the traditional sense of sales revenue or unit sales. It does, however, provide a consistent methodology by which to measure operating system trends.
By this yardstick, Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows, while still dominant with a 90.23% share, has been slowly losing ground. Apple's (AAPL) operating systems, by contrast, have been gaining share at a fairly brisk pace, albeit from a much smaller base.
To see Net Applications' Oct. 1 report, click here. The results are summarized in the table below.
To get a feel for how Internet use compares with unit sales, check out the chart that Alexis W. Cabot has posted on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board using the latest numbers from Gartner and Net Applications:
Folks in Reston living off the government teet are probably better positioned to buy a Mac on a whim. Too bad your colleagues aren't stepping up to Vista–like the rest of the country–they'd love it. And on a platform that outperforms a Mac hands down at less than half the price.
It's great to see a little breakup of the Microsoft stranglehold, but watching the 10% drop on stock price today at the Jobs heart attack rumor, sust shows that he is the Kim Jung Il of the computer industry and that Apple will implode when he is gone. Sad.
Nobody realised that kids got back to schools so it was evident share must grow signicantly same as it decreased in July when they went on holidays? Share is up just 0,29 % compare to June. It is 3,65 % and if you spread it through 3 month … Even during holidays people buys macs. But, hey, we are still growing 
hopefully not into second monopoly…
Most people are so cheap they cheat themselves the food they put into their body. I am frankly amazed that so many people use macs.
And anyway, these figures are for sales, not number of folks using the item by choice.
Everyone who needs 20 or more computers for basic office tasks over the next 5 years is clearly better off getting cheaper, but adequate, pc's running XP.
That doesn't the pc is better. It is a different product, for a different market.
A mac is a kitchen in your home, where you prepare your favourite delicacies.
A pc is a camp kitchen for a pack of grunts whose opinion doesn't matter to their management.
What I find shocking is how low the Linux share is. Let's see how much that changes when more Google Android phones start coming out and more Linux using netbooks start appearing.
Their major assumption here is that the sites in their survey (very limited number) are representative of the web in general.
Furthermore, for Mac OS, their sample is seem as being on the light side, probably trending down from the actual, but illusive, real use data as most of their client sites are windows oriented.
ex ped: There are a lot of problems with Net Applications' market surveys — starting with their use of the term "market share" — but I'm not sure sample size is chief among them. They claim to survey the websites of "7,000 partners and affiliates" and look at some 160 million hits per month. Those are pretty large samples for any survey. (A large poll in the 2008 presidential race will interview 1,500 voters; most sample 600 or less.) The trouble with Net Applications' sample is that it's not scientifically chosen. As you point out, their clients could be weighted more heavily toward Windows than the average computer users. Or too heavily toward Mac OS, for all we know. The best thing that you can say for these surveys is that they use the same methodology month after month and they make the results available to the public. For that reason, I find them useful.
The doubling in iPhone web-browsing usage could imply a doubling of units in use, therefore 2008q4 sales could be equal to all sales in the previous year, or about 6.1M units.
Whilst this result is obviously desirable, one must not assume that NetApplications statistics can be reliably used to predict unit sales.
For exact units sales, we will have to wait for Oct. 21st.
One other quick note, the Apple growth is clearly at Windows' expense. Windows lost .43%, Apple gained .42%…
(And at my office this week, yet another person said, "I've had it with Microsoft! What kind of Mac should I buy?")
WINDOZE SADOMASOCHISTS
People who are into sadomasochism are the same lemming troglodyte weenies who buy into Windoze.
Now with Intel chips being in Macs and Mac users being able to run an OSX and Windoze environment simultaneously, for those PC weenies running Windoze who are thinking of coming into the light and getting a Mac, if you still need your security blanky of problems like having to run file defragmentation programs, disk optimization programs, reloading corrupted application software, reloading corrupted main OS software, trying to limit damage from worm and trojan viruses, blaming others when your hard drive gets deleted when you load their website even though it is just another in a long list of PC viruses, constantly upgrading your antivirus software, well, hell, you can always run your Mac temporarily in Windoze environment so you can get your fix of sadomasochism.