Mac OS X market share sets new record at the end of 2007
With the end of 2007, Apple celebrates two years of the Intel Mac, and what a two years it has been. Web metrics firm Net Applications has just released numbers for December. For those who care, they do it like this:
Context & Ripple Effects
The record December reading from Net Applications caps a year of steady climb rather than a sudden jump: Mac's share of web surfers had already doubled in the eight months to May 2007, and by October AppleInsider put U.S. Mac share at 8.1 percent in Q3. The through-line across those data points is the Intel transition — two years of Intel Macs have given buyers a machine that runs Windows alongside OS X, removing the classic objection to switching.
The same-day Apple 2.0 writeup of the 7.3 percent record and iPhone's 33% jump shows how widely the numbers travelled, and it frames the metric as a halo story: handheld and desktop gains being read together as one brand upswing.
First-order effects
- Apple enters 2008 with its strongest web-metrics position on record, a number it can cite to developers and retail partners as evidence the platform is growing, not niche.
- Net Applications' methodology — measuring share by site visits rather than installed base — gets fresh scrutiny, since the record depends on which measurement lens you accept.
Second-order effects
- Software vendors watching the surfer-share curve face a widening case for native Mac builds, since web usage share is a leading indicator of where paying users cluster.
- Rivals' 'Mac is marginal' positioning gets harder to sustain against a doubled-in-a-year metric, pushing competitive messaging toward price and compatibility instead.
Third-order effects
- If the Intel-transition pattern holds — hardware openness driving share, share driving developer attention — the structural question shifts from whether Mac stays niche to how fast the PC market re-segments around it.
The trend: Two years into the Intel Mac era, web-metrics firms are turning Mac market share from a rounding error into a tracked growth curve that shapes developer and competitor behavior.