OS X Mountain Lion passes 10% adoption in one month, on track to outperform Lion
The report released on Thursday noted adoption of Mountain Lion hit 10.3 percent as of Aug. 27, a little over one month after the operating system was released as a $20 upgrade on the Mac App Store.
The information comes from ad network Chitika's research arm, Chitika Insights, which compiled a month of OS X web traffic, sampling "hundreds of millions" of ad impressions to calculate the distribution of Mac operating system market share.
According to the study, shortly after Mountain Lion was released on July 25, its share stood at 3.2 percent of all Mac-based web traffic seen across Chitika's ad network. The high adoption rate was confirmed by Apple, which said over three million users downloaded the latest software in its first four days of availability, making it the most successful OS X launch in Apple history.
Source: Chitika Insights
The early spike subsided on July 29 after reaching a 5.65 percent share, but the report points out Mountain Lion's adoption rate continues to impress, and reached an average of 9.61 percent of all Mac traffic from Aug. 20 to Aug. 27.
In comparison to OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple's latest offering continues to outperform, as the legacy operating system took three months to hit 14 percent of total Mac traffic. The firm believes Mountain Lion's growth rate will surpass Lion's within three weeks.
Apple's newest OS X offers users tighter iCloud integration, a new messaging application, Notification Center, system-wide sharing, Facebook integration, Dictation, AirPlay Mirroring, Game Center and a host of other fresh features. Most recently, the company released an update to Mountain Lion that fixed a number of issues regarding iMessage, Migration Assistant and audio output on Thunderbolt displays.
54 Comments
I'm telling folks to hold-off on 10.8. I've had it since day one on my MBA and iMac. I use both to run VMware Fusion and since the update to 10.8.1 there's been some network-related quirks that are filtering into my VMware Fusion / Windows 7x64 environment too. Too much that I don't feel for my use, it's ready for giving to my other clients running similar setups. With 10.7.x everything was rock-solid stable. Now, not so much.
Too bad. I really like what 10.8 has. Frustrating that something changed that should not have. I just upgraded to VMware Fusion 5.0 which just in case, I have them looking into the network issue as well.
No surprise, since ML isn't a very risky update.
What should be cause for concern, though, is that there are still more 10.6 users than 10.7 and 10.8 users combined. I wonder if this is about 10.7 dropping support for PPC apps or a sign that the Mac market is growing beyond the engaged users it has been famous for.
With a cost under $20 and such an easy upgrade process I am surprised that number isn't higher. Are my expectations really too high?
I wish that I had not upgraded my late-2009 iMac to Lion. I lost a lot of data that I thought was backed up. What would be the benefit of upgrading this computer to ML? There are a few new features but I recall most of those are limited to newer systems. I do not plan to buy a new computer for a while.