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Y_Y

> Ignoring all the commercial Unixes as they are effectively all dead now,

Ironic that this article would ignore Mac OS, a somewhat notable commercial Unix.

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Which has nearly 34% of desktops in the US! (world wide only 22%)

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

Those numbers don't look right. IDC says it's more like 10% worldwide which seems more believable. (It's presumably higher in the US and it is growing faster than the overall market.)

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS50031623

Macs and PCs might have different lifecycles that might explain some of the difference; if Macs are used on average twice as long as PCs then 10% of shipments might turn into 20% of running computers. Furthermore I suspect far more PCs end up in places that never browse web and become counted by statcounter but are counted in shipments.

Or the customers of websites that use statcounter are more likely to use Mac, distorting the results.

i highly doubt that the average mac users keep their devices twice as long as PC users. based on spending habits i'd rather suspect the opposite.

The Mac may well continue to be used for longer, even if it's by a child of the original owner, or sold to someone else.

And what stops a PC from doing that? Lots of people on here using 8+ year old PCs for daily workloads even.

Indeed, they do it better. Apple drops support for old hardware comparatively quickly and incentivizing new purchases, while Windows has longer support lifecycles with usually (not always, before you get on me about TPMs) good support for old hardware, and it's especially long for Linux.

When my colleagues return their average PCs to me after 4-5 years of use, they are almost always in a worse state than when Macs of the same age are returned. The cases are damaged or worn, the screen might flicker, ports may be broken. Software means the PC "seems slow".

A PC costing as much as the Mac would fare better, but all Macs are high-quality hardware, and only a fraction of PCs. The average PC is discarded before the average Mac.

I don't disagree* but it's mostly irrelevant for computers that don't travel much, which is desktops and honestly a lot of laptops, too.

*Caveat, I can't agree or disagree with the claim that most PCs are discarded faster. We still have a software problem with Macs. I don't know.

Maybe, maybe not. Point is that there are lot of factors at play that can make the market-share diverge depending on what you measure.

The 10% is its share among the computers shipped to customers whereas the 22% is its share among requests (term?) made by desktop OSes to web servers.

These figures are consistent if we assume that the average Mac makes 2.2 as many requests to web servers as the average desktop computer does--which I am ready to believe: some people use the web much more intensively than others do, and I can easily believe that such people are more inclined (specifically, more than twice as inclined) to chose a Mac than the average computer buyer is.

If a person does not care about computers or the internet and uses them only occasionally, then simply based on the differences in purchase price, they are probably much more differentially likely to buy a Windows machine than a Mac.

That while including Linux in the list, which is not a Unix.

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