Windows lost market share in the last decade | Hacker News Reader

Windows lost market share in the last decade

stockapps.com

66 pointsneverminder95 comments

When I started high school–20 years ago next month–there were about ten of us out of 500 students in the school who had Macs. We somehow all got to know each other and shared software and support for the frequent file compatibility issues we all had when working on homework assignments in a Windows XP dominated world. It was kind of a fun community, if also a bit of a support group.

It’s been interesting to watch things shift in the time since, the switch from PowerPC to Intel in the late 2000s seemed to be a sea change moment where suddenly more people were using Macs. I guess the ability to use Windows in a pinch made it a safer choice, and not having a CPU architecture barrier and an OS barrier made it easier to make software for both systems. Obviously we’re in very different times but I’m interested to see how the M1 transition plays out over the next few years. I’ve been surprised so far at how slow it has been for a lot of developer tooling to make the jump–I’ve dead ended at an open Github issue many times trying to help coworkers on M1 get something running locally.

I guess I’m a glutton for compatibility issues, as nowadays everyone I know uses a Mac but I’m running Linux.

Yes, it's tough to believe it's only 15%. In USA and Western Europe Macs became the de facto general purpose computers.

There's a ton of legacy Windows systems and Windows systems in non-tech offices. Plus schools, universities, etc...

And you know millions people who loves playing games and build their own computer to use the CPU they want, the RAM they want, the GPU they want etc.

Macs are nice to some extent but incredibly locked down for my taste both on hardware and software level. Have to use it at work but I'd never ever buy one on my own.

I think you're living in a software developer bubble if you believe that.

In Ireland, the only Mac owners I know are other software developers. Everyone else uses the €500 windows laptops that were on sale however many years ago their last one broke.

I've seen tons of business people on them. Though admittedly at tech companies

mac and apple devices are like 90% of the laptops for people in the art field from what i've seen. And I live in western Europe.

> In USA and Western Europe Macs became the de facto general purpose computers.

For Western Europe: surely not in Germany.

* In your personal bubble

* Which is made of software engineers and tech companies

* Which are all very wealthy relative to the rest of the population

* Which most likely have it paid for by their company.

15% feels like an overstatement if anything.

> ...and Western Europe...

Lol what? Macs are still pretty much non-existant in Europe except in some 'hipster hotspots' like Berlin (typing this on a Mac and far away from Berlin, but still...)

E.g. for a reality check, click on the 'OS Version' line in the table at the bottom to unfold and see detailed OS stats, among gamers macOS sits at 2.45% across all Steam regions (at least it's growing though): https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Using steam gamers to assess Mac market share is unrepresentative in the opposite direction to surveying SF tech workers, given Apple has not bothered to support high end games such as those which steam sells for many years at a time.

I think with the steam deck, we'll see Linux overtake Mac OS in the steam charts in the next year. I don't think Linux will then be as popular as Macs in the world at large.

They could just go the console way. Apple TV sooner or later get an M CPU and it has a great performance.

On the other hand the games are missing, I have Apple Arcade but... it's nothing like compared to PS Plus or GamePass at all

Since you sent a link, I send you another one: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-kingdo... In the UK, macOS + iOS combined overtook Windows (even by a little, but still).

According to your link, Windows has 3 times the market share of OS X. In Germany it is closer to 4 times.

Like I said, macOS and OSX combined. 36% vs the 34% of Windows

You said iOS in the previous comment and OSX in this one, the chart has an entry for Mac OS and no seperate one for OSX, so assuming iOS is the one you're basing the claim on.

While macOS + iOS > Windows, Android outnumbers macOS, so claiming the combined macOS + iOS share means that mac is more popular than Windows is like me using that Android market share to claim that desktop Linux is more popular than MacOS.

TBH I am very surprised that iOS is below Windows. But still, the original article is about "computer operating systems", not about mobile phones.

I'm unclear why you would add iOS to that comparison. It's a toy OS that is comperable to Windows and OSX in name only.

Mobile global market share is Android 72% iOS 27%, but in the United States it's Android 43% iOS 57%.

According to statcounter, Mac has ~25% market share in the US. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

I still see way more windows laptops. In fact I have never even seen an M* based Mac. 15% seem a bit high to me.

People in Europe don't have, or won't spend, thousands for laptops. I think you live in some strange bubble or don't live in Europe.

No. I work on a start upy science park where every fifth car is a tesla, the cafe roasts it's own beans in "Bertha " and the barista is 6'4", dresses like a lumberjack, has a magnificent beard, and insists that they are non binary because they once painted their nails. Even there, in the most wanky of environments imaginable, only about half of the laptop wielders in the work pods / shared spaces / flow rooms (shudder) are using a Mac.

Well roughly 0% of gamers use Macs, and there are a lot of gamers. So that's a huge chunk. Also, most of the devs I know are Linux users on PC hardware. Creatives all tend to be Mac (of course) while general business users tend be split more evenly.

So yeah 15% seems right.

are you in the USA ?

Exactly this. Apple computers are more popular in US than anywhere else, in most other countries they are prevalent in certain industries only.

Previously, they were more prevalent in certain industries in the US as well. That's not as true anymore. I wonder if wider adoption would lag with distance.

Depends, by that time it's possible Microsoft will get its shit together and release a Windows 12 without the unwanted stuff or Linux will get popular enough to fill in the gap.

Any tooling in particular? The only thing I’ve run into is CockroachDB, who seem uniformly uninterested in ARM binaries for anything including Linux.

Docker was a pain for a bit.

Companies I’ve worked for/consulted for are stuck on old Terraform versions that lack ARM builds through tfenv. Providers that are downloaded are similarly affected. Tfenv won’t run its native ARM build and install the Intel arch when it’s the only one available.

I think tooling issues like that are more prevalent than things like language interpreters and libraries you link against.

Interesting - it wouldn’t be too hard to make tfenv build from source if necessary for anything post Terraform 0.5 (the very early days are likely not fully reproducible without some serious effort!)

I won't buy another Windows laptop. It's no longer possible to disable some "features" so I've given up. Windows Defender is impossible to deactivate, it always gets auto-reactivated. External disks that are only connected for archival purposes (and never updated) get scanned again and again, no matter if I exclude them from scanning. Some graphical popups are also impossible to disable.

There are only a few appliances that I needed Windows for, I will deal with them with other means.

>Windows Defender is impossible to deactivate, it always gets auto-reactivated.

It's true that toggling it off in the settings app causes it to get auto-reactivated eventually, but you can still disable it entirely through group policy/registry.

For Windows Home there is no way to disable it. There was some registry setting but it doesn's work anymore. A recent update made it useless.

By the way, I'm no hater, but an old user, since 95. They've worked very hard to lose me as a customer.

You can try wine of course. It has pretty good compatability with non-malicous software.

I don't know, I only have the drawing tablet and the sound hardware, that hopefully will keep working with the current laptop. For the rest Linux will be enough I guess.

Wacom tablets and sound hardware usually run out of the box on any updated/modern linux, so you'd probably be fine

Thank you, it's a Wacom and a Behringer external card.

> According to a StockApps.com data presentation, Windows has lost 17% of its market share in the last decade.

Hardly a representative sample. The headline is a misleading generalization. Their user base won't capture the millions of people forced to use Windows for work.

If you include mobile devices, the Windows market share has probably dropped far more, and that's a more interesting story that this company can't tell us.

I had the same feeling, so I went and Googled and pretty much every source I found pinned Windows at about 75%, plus or minus one or two.

Here’s another: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

Depends if they're worldwide or not. South America is a pro-windows outlier, and both Asia and Africa tend towards it as well.

I can't speak about now, but a decade ago South Korea was almost 99% Windows.

My grandparents bought a game camera at Costco, so they could see what animals were in their yard at night. I had to help them view the pictures on the SD card. It came with some app to view them, or you could just stick the SD card into any laptop. Figuring that was the easier route, I opened up my grandma's laptop and gave them instructions on how to insert the SD card, open Windows Explorer, navigate to the D drive, no wait sorry now it's the E drive, open DCIM, right click here, double click, now single click. 5 minutes later I realized how fucking stupid this all is and installed the app on her tablet.

Being unable to control your peripherials is the most irritating thing ever. Cannot copy music on an ipod - need to use buggy itunes that update every time you want to use it.

Macs have a gutted version of Excel (MS will always gut it to make Windows sales better) - I wonder what kind of work people do if Excel barely works.

The website also does not seem to show who took the market. At first I thought they maybe count Android.

Their source is "we said so?" This site seems like click bait.

I think this was posted as a sarcastic/ironic thing.

How much of this is due to the replacement of home windows machines with mobile devices?

I know multiple families with kids that don't have traditional pc's or laptops in their home. Instead everybody has a phone or tablet. If a kid needs to type up a project a parent will bring home a work laptop.

This is not about market share of all computing devices, It's about PC OS market share.

That's nice and all, but this is almost meaningless. For 25 years, we've had monthly articles in the Microsoft-funded trade press about how Microsoft has all the market share for computers. The implication, as always, is not to bother buying a Mac, or, eww!, using Linux. All of these numbers, for over 2 decades, have been buoyed by corporate purchases, and mean nothing. As as Unix sysadmin, and one of the most-ardent Linux zealots, inside a Fortune 250 in the late 90's and early 00's, even I had to admit that it would have been a mistake to deploy the majority of the "corporate fleet" with anything other than Windows. But if you could ever excise the corporate purchasing data out of these numbers, I think you'd find that Windows has less than 50% of the PERSONAL computing market these days. Maybe even closer to just 25%. I base this on personal observation. Almost no one I know uses a Windows-based computer for their "computer" needs. I've posted about this before, to crickets. If we could get personal buying data from, say, Best Buy and the like, and leave Ziff-Davis and Gartner out of it, I think I could prove it. But I'm sure they're taking money from Microsoft to continue to put the numbers together, so we'll never get the "internal" numbers to figure it out from them.

Everyone that is into gaming uses Windows. I find your 25% claim dubious.

Not even a VM these days.

Not everyone. Linux gaming on Steam is on a steady rise.

The 50% of the gaming market that is consoles would argue with you.

Are you discounting the absolutely massive gaming industry? I have never met a single person in real life that uses Linux, and those that used Macs were only casual computer users

My company has a Linux Slack channel and that's where I finally got to know a lot of 'real people' who also use Linux lol

Steam's Linux user share is steadily growing and making a dent in Microsoft's monopoly even there.

Uh... I used Linux on the desktop for 19 years, and desperately wanted this to happen, but last time I looked, Linux still only accounted for a couple of percent of Steam platforms. Maybe this will change with the Steam Deck, but that's a gimme.

Proton is fueling this growth more than Steam Deck I would think. I know, it's a double edged sword, but still.

I am. Those are the only people who have PC's that I know. That's the point. For non-corporate use, if PC gaming didn't exist, there would BE no PC market.

I wish it were more. I get unreasonably upset everytime I have to use Windows because of how incredibly terrible it is in every way compared to MacOS and Linux.

As terrible as Windows 11 is compared to older versions, I haven't used Windows regularly in 7 years. Looking at Windows 11 with a brand new perspective, at actually looks decent. They just need to finish polishing it off (two different versions of context menus is the most obvious thing to me without doing any deep-diving).

I won't be going back to that spayware-infested/anti-user crap though.

> Looking at Windows 11 with a brand new perspective, at actually looks decent.

Only if you believe the marketing and Influenza(TM) marketing bullshit. Every Windows user who I know and upgraded to 11 is majorly regretting it. Windows 11 is widely seen as the Windows Vista following Windows 10 by its users.

> a brand new perspective

I wouldn't have had a brand new perspective if I was a Windows user who upgraded (like Windows users who you know).

I'm essentially saying:

no Windows experience -> Windows 10, looks pretty decent

different Windows experience -> new Windows is terrible

(I have no idea what Windows 10 "Influenza(TM) marketing bullshit" is.)

Yeah I thought that too (I use a mix of Mac and Windows). But no, Windows is still genuinely terrible. Win11 looks nice on the surface but as you noticed, nothing is finished. It's not just two different styles of context menu inside the same menu, even, which has to be a new level of UI inconsistency even for Microsoft. It's that the entire OS is half baked like that. Not just visually either: maybe I'm more exposed as someone developing for it but major bugs are everywhere.

I don't even care about spyware. It's not that hard to keep Windows clean these days. It's more the overall feeling that everything is half-assed. You don't get the feeling that anyone working on it is truly passionate about Windows anymore.

I kept Win 7 up until the machine was choking. It's a shame they couldn't just update that.

2022 is the year of OpenBSD.

Maybe Microsoft will now stop spamming me with ads in software I PAID for.

I didn't see the actual report, but from the numbers presented, it seems that Windows+Mac has dropped from 99% to 89% in that timeframe.

The source seems very ropy though, "our own data presentation". Great, what's the source of that.

A poorly written press release too -- "That translates to a 93% gain in that time or an average of roughly 1% per year."

Mixing relative gain (7 percentage points in 9 years or "1% per year") and absolute gain (93%).

> Windows+Mac has dropped from 99% to 89%

Hopefully the data is reliable. I used Windows for 20 years before switching to Linux (without dual boot) last year. My new employer mandates Mac for developers. My subsequent experiences have led to me conclude that both Windows and MacOS are utter garbage.

Windows XP/7 was okay (certainly nowhere as good as the Linux desktop on 2022), everything since has been downhill.

MacOS would be useless without the heroic efforts of the community (brew, nix-darwin, co/lima, etc.). Those community efforts are a second-class citizen and have unavoidable limitations. I also don't understand how Windows gets so much shit for updates, when people seem happy with MacOS taking 20-45min to update. Both are shit, to be clear (Silverblue takes 0sec/reboot time).

I switched to linux once MacOs started sending telemetry abouy any move to the homebase.

I love it (and sometimes hate it), and would certanly not go back to mac, however I miss the trackpad (three finger drag), the firewall checkbox to block all incoming connections and press space to see preview (that works in finder, and other apps, ex mail attachments).

KDE has some features that are better than mac. For a developer linux is awesome.

I think there is no other way other than linux. I loved macos but they utterly compromised themselves with the telemetry stuff.

You’re referring to Quick Look, which if I’m not mistaken is included with Dolphin on KDE. There are several options for GNOME, and it works by default on Pop!_OS.

That "Quick Look" preview feature was one of the few things I really liked about the newer Mac OS X variants, but I cannot find anything in my KDE / Dolphin like that thus far. There is a feature easily enabled for hover tooltips with a document preview that I've found tho. Close enough, I guess…

The numbers in the article are very close to statcounter desktop OS market share numbers.

Window will continue to dominate the market as most industries uses MS Office. Also, only tech companies can afford MacBooks for every employee. Every other job can only afford PCs. Even getting a $1.5K “CAD workstation laptop” that weighed 15 lbs and 0.5” thick was a struggle. Let alone a $4K 16” MBP.

The base MacBook costs 1k and is pretty good.

Why are companies often do hesitant to buy their employees good tools? It's what multiplies their performance and the cost is often a fraction of the monthly employee cost ...

There are two groups where I noticed this to be true:

- Ordinary, non-tech people. Pretty much every college-aged student that I know of opts for a MacBook Air/Pro if they can afford it. Another segment are older people. My parents are in this group. 99% of what they used their computers for (Checking bank balances, paying bills, printing stuff) can be done with an iPhone now. Nowadays, I suggest they just buy an iPad if they want a “computer”.

- Businesses that aren’t heavily relying on Microsoft Office. A lot of SMBs use SaaS apps for their line of business and most businesses like using Apple products because long term, they seem to last longer.

There is still a place for Windows, especially in specialized fields like finance or in gaming.

> every college-aged student that I know

I suspect this is often a "self-perpetuating myth." Every college-aged student I know tends to have similar interests to me and my siblings, and we all grew up buying or building PCs and playing PC games, and... they have followed suit. All 9 of my and my spouse's nieces/nephews (all in the 13-19 age range) have a PC. More have Android phones than iPhones, but a few have those. Some of them have asked me for help when choosing what to buy.

Similarly, in my group of friends, many of them are PC gamers, and all seem to own PCs. At work, it has been a mix depending on where I worked, but my current contracted employer supplies everyone with a PC laptop, while my direct employer decides based on that kind of development. 3D design or VR environments? You get a gaming PC. API or web app dev? You'll probably get a Macbook Pro. My previous employer of about 300 employees was 100% a PC environment.

It's all anecdotal, of course, from just where I sit. I do think, having done work on Windows and macOS, there's cross-platform tools for an increasingly large share of the kinds of work to be done, so the decision is probably made based on someone at a high level either having a preference/comfort level, or perhaps doing some due diligence to compare enterprise level support, hardware capabilities and price, and thinking about how that'll affect the bottom line when distributing hardware to 20, 100, 1000 employees.

Sure the article is suspect, but I have to kind of believe Windows market share has dropped considerably in homes. When I visit my son at college I see way more Macs and the only tablets I see are iPads. Yes Windows has the business world locked up for now, but the youth are exposed to mostly iPads and Macs. My daughters have never used Windows because I have Macs and Linux computers in our home and at school they have iPads. I realize my home is not typical, but with more exposure to Chromebooks, iPads, and Apple dominating the phone market, at least in the US, I think a lot more people consider Apple computers or a Chromebook if they even need a computer at home.

I Googled "what is Windows market share" -- and got entirely different statistics.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

It does depend a lot on whether you include mobile devices (where iOS and Android dominate). Here's their stats just for desktop systems (where Windows' share is 76.31%). Not sure what that was 10 years ago...

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

It is very interesting to me that Linux desktop is beating ChromeOS. Not sure what the stats were 10 years ago, but I do not think MacOS or Linux were that high.

Steam Machines/SteamOS, and especially Steam Deck has gained a big following from gamers which is arguably a bigger "home market" than Apple's creative professional home turf. Also I suspect ChromeOS might be losing steam as apple pushes back in education and windows 2-in-1s take back the low end market.

I blame Microsoft (as the root cause) for Linux's rise. Without the danger of games only being available through the Windows store, Valve would never have needed a safety - meaning we'd have no proton, no contributions from Valve, and no Steam Machines or the Steam Deck. I'll be the first to admit the former didn't sell well and the latter is too early to really count, but it's undeniable Valve's had a large, positive impact on Linux adoption.

The article was published in April 2022: "90.96% in 2013 to the current 73.72%"

Statcounter desktop OS share has 91.28% in April 2013 and 74.79% in April 2022. That's very close. So clearly the article is talking about desktop share.

And of course the article talks about macOS as the alternative to Windows, not iOS. The obvious presumption is that the article is about desktop, not mobile.

Thanks for the stats. (Not sure what URL has those April 2013 figures.) What I'm wondering is: who grabbed the other 16.49% over those 10 years? Does Apple's increasingly popularity explain most of that (and was Apple really so unpopular in 2013)? Or has there just been a big rise in "unknown"?

> Not sure what URL has those April 2013 figures.

You can use the Edit Chart Data button to change the date range.

The "Unknown" is the weirdest part of the chart, with inexplicable rises and drops. I expect that's just a data gathering glitch and may actually be some Windows.

Anyway, about 3/4 of the change was Mac. The 2nd biggest gainer was Chrome OS. And then a tiny bit of Linux and Unknown, but mostly Mac and Chrome.

Maybe that's USA related, and even if there is a trend, i dont think MS is threatened by MacOS. It's just a different user base. So many people i know who use macs, really get them for some weird perceived 'status' reasons, and they basically use MS office on them all day. Some of them actually run windows on their desktop mac.

Microsoft is definitely not threatened cause windows is just another Microsoft product. In fact Microsoft makes money off people buying macs with office 365 etc. But Windows is being threatened by both macos and Linux, even if it still has a substantial lead.

I disabled Windows Defender using Group policies when it was erasing data from my samba3 server. Group policy is the only way to control windows any more.

Does anyone have an idea of what 'Unknown' implies for OS market share? In some areas it has a 11% market share.

Only?

Microsoft has been incredibly successful at lodging their ecosystem into firms around the world. Lots of IT infrastructure lives and dies on AD, Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Office, Power BI and the like, and lots of IT personnel live and die on their expertise with such software systems. Given that moat, I'd say a 17% hit is incredible.

Windows is also still the platform for PC gaming due to its support for all the latest GPUs, peripherals, and APIs. Not to mention a ton of other more niche hobbyist activities.

This isn't clear-cut nowadays (especially if you avoid Ubuntu). Linux and Windows trade blows in terms of performance. OpenGL, Vulkan, DX11, and DX12 are all supported on Linux. Some features are a work in progress (RT on AMD for example), NVIDIA are cleaning up their act and their Linux experience matches their Windows experience (and they have full API coverage). Windows only holds dominance through anti-cheat support.

I would say that PC is still the platform for gaming.

Anti-cheat is improving though [0]. EAC and Battleye both have Linux/Proton support and so just need for developers to enable within their apps (Battleye only needs for the Devs to send an email for BE to activate it their end).

[0] https://areweanticheatyet.com

It isn't just anti-cheat, it's support for peripherals and games as well. I recently got into DCS (sometimes kinda works on Linux via WINE), for which I purchased nearly $1000 worth of high-end peripherals which technically work on Linux, kinda, if you give up half of their feature sets because the software that gives you access to those features doesn't work on Linux. VR is also a shitshow on Linux.

I think you have this reversed - it's application (game) level backwards compatibility leading to large market sizes of people who have gaming PCs, which leads to a cycle of dependency which Windows just happens to be a required part. SteamOS, Wine, and similar are attempts to break Windows out of this cycle.

Hardware support is similar - vendors go after the biggest market. Also PC gamers are used to installing kernel drivers from random third parties, whereas other OS vendors usually want drivers to be integrated in the main release.

The Steam Deck and other developments (Proton/DXVK, Nvidia kernel drivers, EAC/Battleye AC support) have weakened that position, though.

Linux is still only 1.2% of PC gaming, but the idea of that increasing isn't as bananas as it was in 2015 before any of these developments were announced/released.

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