Mac Install-Base Shown to Be 16%

Kelly McNeill writes "MacDailyNews has an editorial which summarizes reports from various research groups that analyzed the number of computer users affected by viruses. The conclusion was that 16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs. The lack of viruses on a Mac is commonly known, but the interesting thing is the fact that the results finally provide the first set of conclusive numbers which illustrate the Macintosh's install-base. So far only "market-share" statistics are commonly published for the public and do not convey install base. (If for example 2 people are using computers and one replaces his 2x in a 3 year period and the other only does once, market-share dynamics dictate that one demographic has 75% market share while the other has only 25% -- even though install base is still 50/50.)"

Who made the claim?

I actually went to RTFA because I wanted to see just who it was claiming that the Mac installed base was 16% and what do I find?

Software Publishers Association (SPA) estimates that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs.

OK, I won't worry too much about bias now, though if someone has a reason to think the SPA is off-base, please let us all know. This is truly something to celebrate. Now, let's get the Linux installed base to 16%...

Re:Who made the claim?

if i had to guess, it would be that the parent is from the US, and the grandparent is from Australia or the UK. in those countries, the "6 monthly" formulation is the norm for every six months. having been a visiting physician in papua new guinea (ex-australian protectorate) i had to get used to a medication dosage schedule of "6 hourly" meaning once every six hours and not six every hour.

just FYI

Why this preoccupation with 'bias'?

This statistic is clearly pulled from someone's arse, but for some reason you think it's OK because the arseman isn't a well known Mac zealot?

There are several ways to test the validity of a statement, and none of them have to do with who made the statement. In this case, you could ask how the statistic was collected and how large the sample was. You'll notice the number 16% is a fantasy based on an assumption that has no base in any evidence. It's bunk, 'bias' or not.

I can understand how someone would dismiss out of hand something coming from Rob Enderle or a politician, but not how it's possible to accept something just because the source seems neutral. That's just stupid, and shows an incredibly unscientific mindset.

Re:Why this preoccupation with 'bias'?

While I don't have any hard numbers to provide, from what I've seen working in a mac/PC repair shop is that we see a lot more old macs come in for service than old PCs. People are still bringing in old grey powerpc laptops and performas. They use them every day. When we suggest they upgrade, they say no, this machine does everything I need it to. And that's a machine that's 10 years old. It won't do everything I would personally want, but for these grandmothers and soforth, it's still operational and useful.

We do see PCs come in that are getting near 10 years old, very very rarely, and it's almost always to do a data transfer to a new machine. You just don't see someone with a 10 year old PC that says "this machine still does everything I need it to." Now that might be a statement about the user or about the computer, but I tend to think it's a mix of both.

For that reason I would expect the install base for macs to be surprisingly large. All said and counted, I might go as far as to say that 30% of all macs manufactured, ever, are still in use today. If I had to guess wildly on PCs, I'd place that number at somewhere closer to 10%.

Re:Why this preoccupation with 'bias'?

The black powerbooks are arguably the most upgradeable laptops ever built. The wallstreet, with its dual cardbus bays and dual media bays, was exceptional. I ugpraded mine to a g3/500 which not only increased CPU speed by 66% but also almost doubled battery life. A CD burner was another nice ugprade for it. (I think they have superdrives for them now?) I don't know if the G4 upgrade works with the wallstreet, but I've recently seen a "G4 pismo", upgraded something like this:

http://www.geekculture.com/blurbs/reviews/XLR8G4Pi smo.html [geekculture.com]

Not only is that G4/550, but check out the memory. It's not a new laptop, but it's still not too shabby.

Upgrading a PC, you usually replace the CPU, the logic board, power supply, memory, and the optical drive. That means you're keeping... the case? heh, what's the point?

Re:Why this preoccupation with 'bias'?

I completely disagree.

We don't have the time (or skill) to research the validity of every study ourselves. Even large and well designed studies can be biased by its choice of question. In other words, if a study was funded by an interested party, they will find a way to get the answer they want.

So, we must look at the source, and the funding. So 'who made the statement' is very important.

Re:Long live closed source

I've just tried to fiddle in my Mac. You're right, I don't even come close to fitting in there, let alone have enough room to bow. My AMD box has a lot more room inside, but it's all taken up with cabling and fans. I can hardly hear my fiddle outside the box.

My mom's mac is a PCI machine. I may not be able to fiddle in it, but I can install and change cards. She's running OS8. I'm running OS7 on mine.

Neither one of them gets counted in the market share statistics, although at least my mom's gets counted in web statistics. She's never gotten a virus. Neither has my Mac, but I cheat . . .I've never hooked it up to a net. Pretty much nobody but me, (and you folks look like I can trust you and you won't tell) even knows it exists, yet it has remained part of the installed base for many years.

And I can state catagorically that the installed base of Tandy Color Micros may be small, but it is not zero.

Can't even kazoo in that puppy.

KFG

a questionable basis for a percentage

Hmm, the summary of the article seems to include more facts than the article itself. The summary makes a big point of how TFA's 16% number if found from the virus infection percentage. TFA doesn't say that's where the 16% comes from at all. All the article body says is "In addition, the Software Publishers Association (SPA) estimates that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs." The headline says that 16% of users aren't infected because they use Macs, but it doesn't explain that or justify it. Besides, even if the summary was correct, then this would seem a very poor way to guess at install base. The browser's "user agent" header sent to a general interest site like Google would seem a far better way. Admittedly that would be skewed by Mac users using being "forced" to access Google from Windows in a work environment, but still. That seems like it would have to be more accurate than the approach hinted at in the summary. In searching for google stats on this I found on the Mac Daily News site a discussion which included this very topic [macdailynews.com] when the issue of install base was previously discussed there.

further info about google's zeitgeist OS numbers

An interesting related article and discussion on interpreting Google's zeitgeist OS numbers [osopinion.com]. And what it might mean for % usage of OS (which for Mac ends up being the 3-6% people usually speak of, 3% from Google's direct number and another 3% from Google 'Other' OS).

Re:further info about google's zeitgeist OS number

TheCounter shows just 2% usage share for Mac OS [thecounter.com]. Combined with the 1-2% usage share for Safari reported by OneStat [onestat.com] and 1-2% "other" browser usage reported by WebSideStory [websidestory.com], it's hard to believe Mac OS has 16% of the installed base of desktops. Maybe the vast majority of Mac users don't use pre-installed Safari, or haven't upgraded to Mac OS X yet, or just don't browse the web nearly as much as other OS users?

Re:a questionable basis for a percentage

The browser's "user agent" header sent to a general interest site like Google would seem a far better way.

I run a website that gets a lot of hits due to information links carried on bittorrent sites. I see a startling high percentage of firefox, linux, and various unixes. I therefore conclude that Bittorrent is at this time not for the average idiot, although it is getting more that way every day.

Now google, on the other hand, is not completely without bias. The people in my family who are very clueless about the internet do not use google, they use the default MSN search that comes with Internet Exploder. This is a big deal I think. Lots of people who are clueless use these default searches, not to mention people whose browser has been hyjacked and must use the hyjacked search site. Those people are not (and won't be) running linux, firefox, or unixes.

So I think to really get some meaningful stats about installed bases for Firefox, Opera, Linux, and the like, we must survey lots of sites (1000's) from all manner of target demographics. Any other method of statistical analysis would have some bias.

no virus != apple.

Just because it doesn't have a virus or malware on it, doesn't mean it is an Apple computer. My Laptop is not an Apple, it doesn't have any malware on it (running Linux). My desktop doesn't have any on that I know of, it is running Windows.

I have several other machines of both windows and linux that are completely clean. They aren't apple. I have a Powerbook, that is clean too, but it is an Apple.

That wasn't the conclusion...

...if you actually read the RTFA, you'd notice that the 16% statistic comes from the Software Publishing Alliance, not the editorial itself.

In fact, the conclusion of the editorial is the following two points:

1)More people use Macs than most people realize.

2) People who use Macs don't get many viruses.

Shock! Horror! What next - "The Sky is Blue"? I'm a mac user, and am all for increading market share, but this editorial seems rather vapid...where's the news?

Great news, but in a way I don't care

This is good news to hear. In a way, it confirms what I always suspected (especially since I keep my Macs longer than most of my equivalent PC friends -- and I'm a real gearhead). When you get down to it, though, I don't really care how much marketshare/install base Apple has, so long as they can keep cranking out the excellent products that they do.*

*Please keep in mind that I do realize the connection between profitability and new product development. All I'm saying is that the numbers could mean less as long as I'm a happy customer. And boy am I happy.

16%? that seems a bit high ..

My web site's stats are 1-3% MacOS ( all version ). Even that figure is blown up a bit since a couple of webmaster's use Macs.

Anyway full stats :

Windows XP 495 60.37%
Windows 98 117 14.27%
Windows 2000 85 10.37%
Windows ME 41 5.00%
Other 22 2.68%
Linux 21 2.56%
MacOS X 13 1.59%
Windows 95 11 1.34%
MacOS PPC 6 0.73%
Windows NT 4 0.49%
Windows 2003 4 0.49%
Windows 1 0.12%
Total 820

BOINC says it's much lower.

It's impossible to get the one true metric for this. But the statistics of the BOINC project [berkeley.edu] (formerly SETI@home, now includes other projects as well) give another, perhaps more reasonable data point. [boincstats.com]

They have

• Windows -- 89.5%
• Linux -- 7.8%
• Darwin -- 2.3%
• Other -- 0.4%

Now, this data is obviously skewed with respect to the total distribution, since the people who run something like SETI@home are probably more technologically inclined than the average computer user. This would mean that the percentage of non-Windows OSes is higher in this sample. On the other hand, the software for BOINC (SETI@home) is still somewhat Windows-centric, which would in turn increase the Windows share in the sample.

An interesting data point, nonetheless.

I say bullshit

Seti@home was well known for denying PPC/AltiVec optimizations to their software. So the project was abandoned by most Mac user who then went to distributed.net. Read [macnn.com] about it. Excerpt:

"SETI@Home 2.0.4 was the fastest version of SETI for Macs. It relied heavily on the amount of L2 cache on the processor. Since most modern macs have 512K or 1MB of cahe it was able to produce results far better than a PC of the same MHz. But when 3.0 came all that changed. The L2 cache programming was removed and the speed was based solely on the MHz. So then Macs fell behind in WU times." [...]

"The best part of RC5 is that it is Alti-Vec and multi-processor aware, and Macs crunch data 5 times faster than a PC of the same MHz. It is a great way to show off the speed of your CPU."

Re:I dunno....

I work for an ISP. I get maybe 2 or 3 calls from Mac people in a 5 day week. I handle more than 40 calls in a day. And in my professional opinion, you have to be completely retarded to think that PC/Mac usage is anywhere even in the same ballpark to 50/50.

While I agree it's nowhere near 50/50, your anecdotal evidence makes a few assumptions. The biggest assumptions it makes would be that macs break down at the same rate PCs do and that mac users require the same amount of technical support PC users do.

Speaking as a mac user I've got to say 16% sounds high, but your 1.5% sounds quite low.

Sigh ...

I work for an ISP. I get maybe 2 or 3 calls from Mac people in a 5 day week. I handle more than 40 calls in a day.

Now, can you think of any other reason why that may be? Like making an internet connection is the easiest on the Mac compared to all platforms I know of?

you have to be completely retarded to think that PC/Mac usage is anywhere even in the same ballpark to 50/50

Submitter didn't imply that. That figure was an example.

I constantly hear Mac zealots all excited about their new shiny G5 in some overly pretentious colour like magenta or something

Hmm, now this is a lie. Because for years Apple only made machines in white, grey or aluminium.

Most PC people I know are more interested in buying a $600 video card for their 5 year old PC.

I have the strong feeling you are trying to make a point there, I only can't see what that may be ...

Let me see if I can follow this.

Given the data points:

- The vast majority of studies estimate the installed base of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
- One study estimates it at sixteen percent.

The conclusion is:

- The studies estimating at three to five percent must have been doing something wrong

D...id I miss something here?

Re:Let me see if I can follow this.

Yes. Your first statement should be:

- The vast majority of studies estimate the marketshare of the macintosh at somewhere around three to five percent.
- One study estimates it (installed base) at sixteen percent.

There is a difference between installed base and marketshare.

If a PC user buy a new PC every other year and a Mac user buy a Mac every four years, you would see that the PC has 60% marketshare, but the installed base is still really only 50%.

Given that Mac users have claimed, for a while, about how long they last (a combination of higher price and higher satisfaction, I'm sure, in that they can't afford to buy a new Mac every other year, and that when they bought it in the first place it met their needs to the point that they didn't need to buy or upgrade a couple years later because it was slow or unsatisfying or virus infected), it wouldn't surprise me if Mac users replaced their Macs every 8 years while PC users have traditionally replaced their PCs every 3.

Okay, the submission summary is odd

The article makes a number of points, and those interested could RTFA - yeah right. The points it makes are taken from other articles.

One of them is AT&T Natural Voices coming soon for Apple Mac OS X [macdailynews.com]

"When you consider the dynamic growth of Apple products and the high quality of user interface that Apple users expect, it seemed very compelling to make this great technology available to the Apple development community as well."

[...] According to US News and World Report, Macintosh owners buy 30% more software than their Windows counterparts. Further, Macintosh software comprises over 18% of all software sold, according to the Software and Information Industry Association. In addition, the Software Publishers Association (SPA) estimates that 16 percent of computer users are on Macs.

So cheer up, they only count people buying software, thus most Linux users don't show up here ;-)

Certain metrics tilts the board in favor of Macs

I can't personally find a link to the SPA web site, but if it includes shareware developers, and I think it does, this could very easily be explained.

There's a creeping suspicion that the average Mac users spend more on software than the average PC (and by PC in this context I mean Windows on x86, because it's shorter to write) user. Why is this?

Most PCs sit around in offices and do stuff you'd normally do with Office - word processing, spread sheets, emails. Far from all PCs, of course, but definitely *most*.

A sizable part of the Mac installed base are those who do publishing, or video editing, or DVD production, or something with media in general. These people go out and buy font managers, editing software and plug-ins, each probably running up an average of 80 bucks per product, with the actual editing software running from 200 bucks and up, not uncommonly into 500+ territory. People do this on PCs too, but I would bet on the percentage of the installed base being a lot smaller.

Another sizable part of the Mac installed base are those who sit at home and buy lots of shareware. This has a direct counterpart in the PC world, and they're probably about the same size percentage-wise. Note that games fall in the same price spectrum, that the hard-core gamer is likely to spend more on extra hardware (mice, gpu, keyboard, display) than on software, and that piracy probably helps inflate this segment.

And then there's also the fact that, *for whatever reason*, people seem to use Macs longer. Getting three years out of a Mac isn't extraordinary, it's average. Macs also have a higher value on the used market, so there's no rush to sell it.

I think all of this adds up to a skewing of these statistics.

Math?

(If for example 2 people are using computers and one replaces his 2x in a 3 year period and the other only does once, market-share dynamics dictate that one demographic has 75% market share while the other has only 25% -- even though install base is still 50/50.)

Let's go over this: Person A buys a peecee but feels compelled to upgrade later (by buying a new computer) resulting in an 2 peecees purchased while Person B buys a Mac only once. The install base is 50/50 but the market share shows that 2/3 of computers bought are peecees and only 1/3 are Macs. Where did the 75%/25% come from?

Now that we've established that your summary sucked (no offense), should I bother reading the article? It is /.

On another note, in the Astrophysics Department here at Caltech, I'd say something like a fifth of the install base is Windows, the rest being Macs and Linux (with more Mac laptops and linux desktops) and several other non-engineering science departments have many more Macs than Windows boxen but if you want me to believe that a macs make up 16% you've better have some really good data out there that no one else does.

Unfortunately,

Windows still has the remaining 384%.

Lies, Damn Lies, and "Market share"

The only browser/OS market share statistics I trust are the ones based on my own first-hand experience. All the others tend to ignore important relevant criteria, produce wildly differing results, and are often colored by ideological and/or financially-motivated bias.

Based on first-hand empirical evidence, it's perfectly clear that Mac users make up about 40% of desktop computer users, and about 60% of laptop users, and that approximately 75% use Firefox as their primary browser. Among Mac users, Safari and Firefox use is approximately 50-50%

Of course, this was the same method I used to predict last year's Democratic landslide...

Re:Inaccurate

People may buy a Mac, then install Linux or *BSD onto it.

That's something I've never understood.

Mac hardware's nothing special - it's primarily the software that makes Macs so great in comparison to a typical Windows/Linux/BSD PC. Why the heck would anyone buy a Mac and then install a Linux on it? Just doesn't make sense.

Some more interesting obervations

1) There are people who respond to this article who keep referring to a Blue Screen Of Death. I haven't seen one of these in about 5 years. This either means that a) the people referring to the BSOD because it's a much talked about windows occurance that was a feature on an OS that is at least 6-7 years old and don't realize that it just doesn't happen on the newer OS's becuase they are a) lying mac fanbois or b) they are using really old windows software and are stupid.

So which category do I fit into then ? Windows XP, fully service-packed and with a single application installed (Xilinx Foundation, approx $2500, it's all I use the machine for), BSOD yesterday after running a place-and-route for approx 10 hours. I would have used the linux box but it has been busy running a similar PAR for about 2.5 days now. Identical machines, same software, one crashes, the other just carries on working...

2) People are assuming that since a seemingly impartial source is pulling a number out of their ass, it must be accurate.

No, you're assuming they're assuming that. I read it as 'hey, these guys *aren't* paid to lie - fancy that!'. The truth (or lack thereof) of the article rests on its merits.

3) People actually think that the MAC is impervious to virii and malware. Anyone ever take a root kit and run it on the mac? Works quite nicely. I've never seen a virus for the PC as powerful as a r00tkit for *nix. Someone with a little programming experience and the ability to execute a script can write a virus for the mac. Quite easily. Mac folks, you day is coming. Enjoy it while it lasts.

It works quite nicely, how ? Do you have any example rootkits that work remotely ? As far as I'm aware, a rootkit is only a threat when it can be installed remotely via an exploitable hole in the system. If you have root access to the system, you don't need a rootkit to make it vulnerable! Just as a data-point, linux rootkits won't work on a mac, for the obvious reason that they're running very different software and potential exploits will therefore be different!

4) People don't seem to understand that Windows is no Mac is no Linux. They are not interchangable. I have a Mac and I have a Windows Box. I love OSX. I love the look and the feel. What I don't love is the amazing lack of software to do anything that interest me that I Can't already do on an XP box. Outside of Photoshop and Final Cut, the 64 Bit Opteron beats the crap out of the G5 hands down for abou half the price. I'm still looking for a FREE Ftp program for my MAC other than the command line. WTF people?

Well, this is down to personal taste of course, but I tend to use commandline ftp even on a windows box... I'm a unix-orientated guy and that's the way I prefer to work. OTOH, you can just type 'ftp://user@host' into the 'Finder->Go -> Connect to server' dialogue box and it'll open up the directory just like any other Finder window. It works the same way for 'smb:', 'nfs:', 'afp:' etc. etc.

Sure, XP has *more* software, and there are a few areas where the Mac still lacks (eg: EDA, hence the XP box), but for the 90% of people who don't fall into that category, it's there waiting for the taking.

5) I appreciate that people are idealistic and are willing to make decisions based on some screwy ideal they have about what they think makes a better world, OS, et al. But being idealistic doesn't mean that you are automatically right and in a better place morally. In most cases, you are just a simple minded ecentric that people don't understand and therefore are given the street cred that you are "edgy", "cutting edge" and "visionary". It's one reason most folks group MAC users in with the Vegans, Goths, and Envrio-freaks. Face it, you're just a little wacky and think you can actually change the world with a rhyme and a different point of view. Y