Mac's Internet share grew 5% in Sept.
Apple's (AAPL) share of global Internet traffic is just a thin green slice in a great pie of Microsoft (MSFT) blue, but that slice grew more than 5% last month as Windows' share fell — as it has for eight of the last 12 months — according to data released overnight Thursday by Net Applications.
The Mac's share in September, as measured by the Net metrics firm, was 5.12% — up from 4.87% the month before — while Windows' was 92.77%, down from 93.06%.
The Mac's 5.12% seems quite puny when compared with the 9.77% share Net Applications reported for Mac OS X in May. But that was before the company changed the way it weighs its data in order to more accurately reflect worldwide market shares, as opposed to the U.S.-centric numbers it used to report.
The iPhone's share also grew in September — to 0.35% from 0.33% — a 6.06% increase from a very small base. In May, before the re-weighting of the data, Net Applications reported the iPhone's share as 0.6%.
Net Applications’ monthly surveys are conducted by sampling browser data from some 160 million visits to websites operated by its clients. The company describes the results as “market shares,” but they do not actually measure share of market in the sense of sales revenue or unit sales. They used to provide a consistent methodology by which to gauge operating system trends. Now, not so much.
You can see Net Application's September report here. The results are summarized in the chart below.
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Wow, is this an Opinion piece? Looking at this article and the history of your articles (http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/author/philiped/), you have an obvious Apple / iPhone / Mac bias. I would hardly call this 'outside the reality distortion field'.
To comment that "They used to provide a consistent methodology by which to gauge operating system trends. Now, not so much." seems VERY prejudice, perhaps you could elaborate how this data doesn't represent OS trends now that it takes WORLD WIDE into account instead of just the U.S.? It would seem that this would make the data even more accurate.
ex ped: You can't tell by looking at Net Application's site today, because they've adjusted all their past reports. But as reported here, the June re-weighting caused the Mac's Internet share to drop more than 51% in one month, the iPhone's to drop 58%, and Java ME's to increase 218%.
I'm not saying their methodology isn't more accurate — in fact, I agree that it is. I'm saying it's not exactly "consistent."
FYI, I get accused of being biased against Apple about as often as I get accused of being biased for it.
Actually, Net Applications screwed up twice this year. The second time was a few weeks ago when they re-revised Baidu's market share in search engines from 9 % to 3 %, apparently because there were lots of roboclicks in the stats that had previously been undetected. I wonder how Net Application's partner websites are feeling about this? PED is right to call out their unreliability.