According to official figures released by both companies, Windows 10 has 4x the number of active users of macOS — with 400 million users for Windows 10 versus 100 million for Mac.
While Microsoft’s figures have been available for a while, Apple’s 100 million figure is newly published, as part of Apple’s efforts to prove it still cares about Mac.
Don’t feel too bad for Apple, though: despite the difference in popularity, the Mac division is still approaching a $25 billion run rate, which makes it almost big enough to be a Fortune 100 company on its own. The fact that Apple also controls both hardware and software means it can achieve far greater profit margins than just selling software.
As per Apple’s figures, its MacBook lineup represents around 80 percent of all Mac shipments, while desktops such as the iMac represent only 20 percent. Despite the fact that Apple has announced that it is planning to release new Mac Pro and iMac models targeted at the pro market, only “single digit percentage” (thought to be at the lower end) of Mac owners are Mac Pro customers. If you’re curious about how macOS stacks up against Windows, check out this detailed comparison of Windows vs Mac.
Despite the somewhat mixed reception the new Touch Bar MacBook Pro received from critics, Apple additionally notes that MacBook Pro sales grew 20 percent year-over-year in the latest fiscal quarter.
A report from late last year suggested that the Mac division has been suffering from a lack of clear direction from senior management, departures of key employees, and technical challenges — all conspiring to make the Mac one of Apple’s forgotten divisions. Hopefully today’s news suggests that perception is changing!
Coincidentally, both Apple and Windows 10 maker Microsoft celebrated anniversaries of their founding over the past week, with Apple forming as a company on April 1, 1976, and Microsoft one year earlier on April 4, 1975.
Source: TechCrunch
Via: The Verge
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
6 responses to “Windows 10 is 4x more popular than macOS”
If Apple ever changed their macOS licensing to allow virtual machines on other than Mac hardware as well as run on PCs they would destroy Win10. Yes you can Hackintosh but it’s less than ideal.
But world domination is not their goal.
Apple’s not going to do that since they don’t have to, plus if Apple were to license their OS for other hw, they would have to charge at least $300 a year similar to Red Hat charges $300 a year for Red Hat Linux with support. Apple’s business model is hardware based sales, rather than software based like Microsoft. the way things have gone, Microsoft has to have the majority of the market share in order to be successful, Apple doesn’t have to have majority market share to be successful.
The thing is, Microsoft still has the majority of their users still using Windows 7 or earlier and I’m wondering how many of those people are actually going to upgrade to Windows 10. Microsoft needs to worry about that since that’s a lot of potential users switching to Macs, Chrome OS or Linux.
Obviously, IBM is one company that’s shifting away from Windows to macOS, but there are other large companies that have employees switching to Macs as well as large companies have been implementing user choice where they can use a Mac or Windows computers. When a company allows Macs or Windows, Macs begin to get market share away from Windows, and they typically get about 30% or more market share within a couple of years.
One thing to think about. When Apple releases a new OS, they get the majority of their users to switch within a year. Windows 10 has been on the market for now 2 years and they still have only about 20 to 25% of their user install base using it. So far, Microsoft is getting about 10% of their install base switching to Windows 10 from previous versions PER YEAR. That means in 10 years, they’ll have all of their users on Windows 10 that still want to use Windows. But is Microsoft going to release a new OS (Windows 11) in that time frame? Is Microsoft going to start charging a yearly subscription rate like they charge large enterprise customers? I believe that Windows has dipped below 90% market share on a global level, so Windows is slowly eroding.
I would think that Microsoft should have a lot more users in 2 years since Windows 10 was released, especially when they HAD over 90% market share. But even their own users aren’t upgrading as fast as Microsoft wants, so Microsoft has to figure out how to get their own users to upgrade. It’s a lot easier to get users to upgrade than it is to switch.
Duh, point being the article makes it sound like Win10 is beating Apple when it’s not even the same. Apples to Oranges all over again.
Apple does their thing their way and Microsoft likewise. You can’t really compare based only on market share. Mobile is dominating both and have far surpassed the PC/Mac market entirely. Most consumers do just fine with a smartphone and or tablet.
You cannot run macOS in a virtual machine unless it’s on Mac hardware. It is certainly possible to do so but you are breaking the license so companies won’t do it. VMware has thousand of Mac Mini’s to do it legally. But it would be much more efficient to do it on big server clusters like all other virtualized operating systems.
“A report from late last year suggested that the Mac division has been suffering from a lack of clear direction from senior management …”
Is it just a coincidence that as Apple Park nears occupancy, senior management finally pivots back to the Mac?
Yeah, it’s pure coincidence. I think it’s just a lot more complicated because they have to deal with a lot of variables. They have to analyze screen technology, Intel CPUs, AMD GPUs, they’ve been hiring GPU engineers so they are going to be releasing new GPU chips on the ARM side.
Remember, what Apple said not too long ago. They are looking at more ways to ADD ARM chips to X86. So they have been working on feature enhancements that leverage ARM processors as well as performance enhancements leveraging ARM processors. They have to rethink the Mac Pro case design, which I’m glad they finally admitted to making that mistake.
It’s just that the market has been more focused on mobile devices than desktop, so that’s where most of their energy goes. PC sales have been slowly deteriorating over the years, remember?