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Comment by AJAlabs | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see that there are more Windows XP users than there are Mac OS X users running all versions combined.

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Even all Mac OS X and Linux combined is less than Windows XP. Think about that.

That's because there are still a lot of XP users in SE Asia, and particularly in China.

Netmarketshare doesn't divulge country numbers unless you are a paying customer.

Netmarketshare also "balances" its numbers, so the results could vary a lot according to how much weight it gives to China.

Interesting side note: ive only swen Windows 7 discs so far on markets in SEA. Even cambodia seems win7 dominated. But they also sell cheap laptops with mint on them.

I wonder how it would look like if we ignored pirated copies (i.e. pretty much most of Asia, Africa and the Middle East) and server versions.

What would be the point of that?

Not to speak for the original poster but as a dev I'd like to know what my addressable market is if I'm developing a desktop-focused app, and excluding biz machines and people who will never pay would help there

Well, a significant number of osx machines in those places are mackintoshes' :)

Not that it changes anything

> a significant number

[citation needed]

Walk into a random pc shop in India and ask for a cheap mac ;)

If you're developing an app you need to figure out addressable market separately for it anyway. None of the apps I've developed until now really have the same % as any of those graphs - your audience will vary with the use-case.

The only thing the original proposal would do is make Apple look better, but it wouldn't really be USEFUL for anything.

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