X
Business

Mavericks now runs on 40 percent of Macs five months after release

Five months after Apple released OS X Mavericks, the desktop OS now runs 40 percent of Macs.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

The uptake of the latest version of OS X always runs at a far slower pace than that of iOS but, according to online ad network Chikita, Mavericks has seen the fastest rate of adoption among Apple's recent desktop OSes.

"At 40 percent, the share of OS X web traffic generated by Mavericks users is approximately six percentage points higher than what OS X Mountain Lion achieved nearly 14 months following its public debut, and 13 percentage points higher what was recorded at the seven-month mark," the company says in its latest report on OS X distribution.

Chikita's analysis is based on web traffic generated from Macs in the US and Canada across 350,000 websites in its network that were catalogued between March 17 through March 23 2014.

Of course, one reason why Mavericks might have edged ahead of its predecessors is that Apple made it a free upgrade for all supported hardware when the OS was released last year, mirroring its strategy for OS upgrades for its iDevices.

OS X distribution for March 2014
OS X distribution for March 2014. Image: Chikita

On the other hand, given that it is free, perhaps it's surprising that uptake hasn't been faster. However, as Chikita notes, unlike iOS system updates that are pushed out to users, Mac owners weren't "actively solicited" to update to Mavericks. Though, it adds, this may change in future with Apple's addition of autoupdate features that check for app and system updates.

When it comes to getting all devices on to the latest OS, nothing comes close to iOS. Two months after iOS 7's October release it was already installed on 74 percent of iOS devices, making life a little easier for developers by providing a more consistent compatibility base to work with. Today, iOS 7 runs on 85 percent of iOS devices.

At the other spectrum is Android. Five months after Google released Android 4.4 KitKat, the OS runs 2.5 percent of Android devices that connect to Google Play.

And then there's Windows 8, released in October 2012, which runs on 6.3 percent of the world's PCs and Windows 8.1, which runs 4.3 percent of all PCs five months after it was released, according to Net Applications figures.

Microsoft of course is in a different position to Apple in that it relies heavily on revenues from Windows licensing, so while it's free to upgrade from Windows 8, it still costs at least $150 to upgrade from older versions. 

Read more on Mavericks

Editorial standards