On Wednesday, November 13, 2002, at 03:58 PM, Rich Morin wrote:
Eh? 5M new Macs, all on OS X, brings the ratio to 10M OS X, 20M MacOS. Then 10% or the existing base is 2.5M, which would bring it to 12.5M OS X, 17.5M MacOS. That's still only 41.7% for OS X.At 8:45 PM -0500 11/12/02, John Gruber wrote:Even Apple admits that they expect only 20 percent of the Mac user base to be running OS X by the end of 2002. It could be quite a long time before that number gets to 50.There are ~25 million Macs out there. 20% of this is ~5 million. If Apple sells ~5 million Macs in 2003 (all running OSX) and another 10% of the existing base switch over, you have ~50% by the end of 2003.
However, I'm generally optimistic about it - I'm guessing that most of the MacOS users are in one of the following categories:
1) People who can't upgrade hardware or software for various reasons, so they keep a "static" system which doesn't need (and can't get anymore) much support
2) High-end users who are dying to switch, but need to wait until their software is properly supported, or until they can properly do a massive switchover of technologies in their business
There are doubtless some people who stick with MacOS because they just like it better, but I bet there aren't very many of them.
Anyway, where does that 20% figure from Apple come from? That seems low to me, but maybe it reflects a bunch of machines in school labs and so on?
-Ken
