Windows 10 made solid gains in September, albeit not quite as much progress as the previous month, with Windows 7 falling quite heavily – and Apple’s macOS made headway at the expense of Microsoft’s desktop operating system in general.
That’s the story going by the latest figures from analytics firm Net Applications, with the breakdown for all desktop operating systems showing that Windows 10 reached 52.38% of market share in September, an increase of 1.39%. As mentioned, that’s not quite as impressive as the major gain of 2.13% witnessed in August.
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Despite Windows 10 not doing quite such a good job of poaching Windows 7 users this month, the latter outgoing operating system fell by a considerable amount: 2.2% in fact.
That’s a much larger drop than the 1.49% decline seen in August, and it leaves Windows 7 with a share of 28.17% of all desktop PCs. Windows 8.1 also dropped 0.72% in September, and is dwindling away on a total 3.48% share.
Mac attack
So, Windows 10 didn’t gain as much as it should have done on the face of it, looking at the amount of folks abandoning the older Windows operating systems, but some of the overall shift was felt elsewhere – in Apple’s PCs, in fact.
The latest version of macOS (10.14) forged ahead to a 7.15% market share this past month, up considerably from 5.95% last month (and indeed the 4.85% share macOS 10.14 held if you go back to February).
Considering all versions of macOS collectively, Apple’s operating system rose to an overall share of 11.55%, up strongly from 9.68% the previous month. Granted, it was on 10.6% back at the start of the year, but this is still a full percentage point better than we’ve seen throughout the course of 2019. And indeed better than the Mac operating system has ever done going back to 2016 (which is where the historical statistics from Net Applications tail off).
In the overall picture, of course, it isn’t surprising to see Windows 7 decline, considering that the end-of-life for the aging OS rolls around in January 2020, just a few months away now.
Although the boost for macOS is something of an eye-opener. That said, we’d be foolish to put all that much stock in a single month’s figures from one source, as there could simply be statistical variances at play to some extent. But still – if the Mac creeps up again next month, maybe we’ll start to see an upward trend for Apple computers.
And that would certainly make things interesting…
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Via Computerworld
