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Windows XP drops below 40% market share while Windows 8 passes 1%
- hexasquid 14y agoSo for every 7 Macs out there, there is one Windows 8 pc? Am I reading that right?
- w1ntermute 14y agoIt can be hard to tell when you're immersed in the tech community, but OS X only has around 7.3% of the overall desktop OS market share[0]. So if Windows 8 took 1% of the market share, it would have 1/7th the share of OS X. 0: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8&qpcustomd=0 http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoWindows 8 hasn't been out on the market for more than a few months. Why is that surprising?
- drivebyacct2 14y agoNot interested in taking sides, but it seems like OS X seems to migrate users on major version upgrades much faster than Windows. Actually, every OS I can think of seems to have faster upticks in major versions than Windows. I can think of lots of reasons why that may be though.
- philwelch 14y agoFor one, it costs $20 to upgrade your OS X. Windows 8 costs three times as much.
- Rovanion 14y agoBut to compensate for that a new version of OSX is released three times as often as a new version of Windows is.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoOS X tends to break older apps IIRC. On the other hand, Windows has excellent backwards compatibility. And there's always the very long support period.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago"OS X tends to break older apps" [citation needed] New versions of OS X don't break older apps. The opposite is true: new apps are often coded to take advantage of APIs in newer versions of OS X, those will not work on older versions of OS X. My 2004 PowerPC notebook can't run the most current OS X, and few new apps work on PowerPC Macs. That's why I still use Adobe CS3 on that computer. My 2009 Intel desktop Mac can run all apps ever released for OS X, even the ones compiled for PowerPC. About Microsoft: Lots of drivers needed to be rewritten for Vista in order for peripherals to work. Internet Explorer 9 doesn't work on Windows XP and older. Internet Explorer 10 doesn't work on Vista and older. Modern UI apps don't work on Windows 7 and older.
- CrazedGeek 14y ago> New versions of OS X don't break older apps. A minor QuickTime version update halfway into Tiger's lifespan completely broke RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for a while. It wasn't an OS update, granted, but still irksome. Also, Mountain Lion throws a hissy fit if you try to run a Flash-based app with Gatekeeper enabled (even if you do the right-click->open workaround). > My 2009 Intel desktop Mac can run all apps ever released for OS X, even the ones compiled for PowerPC. Are you still running Snow Leopard, by any chance? http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/26/mac_os_x_lion_drops_front_row_java_runtime_rosetta.html http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/26/mac_os_x_lion_drop...
- gizmo686 14y ago> A minor QuickTime version update halfway into Tiger's lifespan completely broke RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for a while. Any insight into how that happened?
- mhurron 14y ago
- ImprovedSilence 14y agomy surprise (and the way I took hexasquids) was that widows 8 had already reached 1/7 of the amount of users of osx.
- Empro 14y agoSo far, but by this time next year that ratio will be very different.
- sergiotapia 14y agoYour distortion field is so concentrated! You realize the Mac OSX has been out for quite some time, while Windows 8 has barely a few months in the market, right? I think it's time you clean out your fanboy lense.
- cmelbye 14y agoPlease don't call people "fanboy"s, or any other name for that matter, on Hacker News.
- toksaitov 14y agoI wonder where those 40 million copies went (no hate here, just interested whether OEMs (or users) buy such incredible volumes in advance).
- Mythbusters 14y agoWindows 8 shines on a touch screen laptop. I was in the market for one over the black Friday and not many were available at a decent price. If that picture changes then I am sure the adoption will accelerate.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoThe best device for Win8 is what Microsoft calls the "convertible". A device that's a laptop one second and a tablet the next. I particularly like the Surface, and those ultrabooks that bend backwards, so you can use the base of the unit to keep it stood up!
- stephengillie 14y agoWin8's hybrid interface is exactly designed for these hybrid devices that can change use-cases in a second. Surface tablets are just a variation on the tablet/laptop convertible idea. The first convertibles had screens that swiveled 180 degrees, and the back of the screen latched against the keyboard. Many ideas have been tried out, some having an always-forward screen and a keyboard that "slide-and-rotate" out from underneath. Others have a screen which rotates vertically inside a frame, allowing it to flip over and cover the keyboard. Surface basically takes the motherboard & battery and fits them behind the screen, instead of under the keyboard. The keyboard itself can become just a detachable accessory. This arrangement isn't new -- it's been used in many mobile devices for more than 10 years.
- rlu 14y agoIt's mentioned in the article though not really on topic but...any idea why Chrome has been losing users for 3 months in a row? Where are they going to? Firefox? Why? What is Chrome doing wrong/others doing right?
- pav3l 14y agoThe thing about statistics is that it can be different depending on who measures it. According to StatCounter[1] Chrome's share has been rising from 34.21% to 35.72% in the last 3 months. [1]http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/
- aluhut 14y agoI realised that both crash (possibly because of plugins) BUT it is easier to kill one Firefox process in the task manager then x Chrome processes. Adblock works with ff better also. I use Opera as secondery browser.
- philwelch 14y agoI don't use Windows, but Chrome's Adblock Plus works great (perfectly if you disable the "allow not-so-bad ads" preference) and I've never had all my Chrome processes go rogue, usually just one, and I can kill it by closing the tab itself or by using Chrome's process manager.
- aluhut 14y agoI've seen Ads in Chrome I haven't seen in years. Nasty popups also. I am not the only one with the experience so I guess we two are just not surfing the same pages but belive me: it is not as good as the one for FireFox. Even if I don't understand why...
- brianchu 14y agoI'm a Firefox user. Extensions are a big deal for me. I'd love to move to Chrome, but: 1) I use tree-style tabs (tabs arranged in a column at the left) in Firefox since I usually have 10-some tabs open. Chrome used to have this but they disabled it, and no extensions for this work. 2) Firefox uses less memory (older versions of FF used to be notorious for leakage, but the benchmarks I looked at showed Firefox outperformed Chrome in memory usage). Granted, Chrome probably has slightly faster page loading.
- webwanderings 14y agoI am sticking with XP for my home PC as long as I can. I really don't have a good reason to move off. Why break things when they work.
- elchief 14y agoPlease tell us you use Chrome or FF at least :)
- webwanderings 14y agoI have stopped pretty much all of the unnecessary services and am running a XP with 3.5 G memory (though it doesn't recognize more than 3.11 due to some hardware limitation). I was using Chrome with Themes service disabled until I realized that Chrome has a consistent bug where it wouldn't show check boxes on the web pages properly and the solution is to enable the Themes and all works fine. With Windows default Firewall and MS Security Essential, I am pretty satisfied with lean, mean XP machine.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoThe thing that got me off XP quickly was how difficult it is to find applications. "All Programs" becomes an unnavigable maze unless you spend a lot of time keeping it in order, which almost no one did. Since Vista Windows has had universal search which is very nice.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
- tvwonline 14y agoDoes anyone think that iOS and Android tablets should be included in these reports? I think it is only a matter of time before for some people, a tablet will be their primary computing device.
- mtgx 14y agoBy the end of the first month Windows 7 passed 5% of the market, so Windows 8 sales are 5x slower than for Windows 7. This is pretty bad for Microsoft and I don't think it will get much better from here. In fact, they were supposed to get a boost in the launch quarter, and so far they haven't as PC sales have fallen by 21% compared to a year ago. http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/30/windows-8-hard-sales-numbers-are-finally-out/ http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/30/windows-8-hard-sales-numb... And by the way, this shows Net Apps' data is not to be trusted yet again. NPD has already said the sales numbers are 58% for Windows 8 for new PC's sold this month, while Net Apps says it's 68%. I for one trust NPD more, because they actually measure sales, not traffic data through weird methods.
- Shorel 14y agoI just reinstalled Windows XP after some years of using Windows 7. I will use Windows 7 again, just not in my current computer, but on a new one.