Switzerland has the highest percentage of Mac users than any other with a 17.61% share. Luxembourg comes in second with a 15.79% share while the US occupies the third slot with a 15.36% share. Countries that just missed the top 10 include the UK, Japan, and France. Interestingly, Nordic countries seem to love their Macs as all five of them (Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark) all made the top 20.
The linked article talks about OS X, and refers to the statistics as if they were measuring desktop/notebook market share solely.
15-20% seems a little high for desktop share compared to previous numbers I’d seen. Does anyone have another source?
Edited 2011-03-18 21:08 UTC
The article is just an aggregation of interesting stats from statcounter. I couldn’t be bothered to go through every country’s OS market share, but a quick check for Switzerland indeed puts their’s at 17.61% for February 2011.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-CH-monthly-201002-201102
All this shows is that OSX usage is high in countries with high incomes and low in poor countries. eg The median male wage in Australia is around USD62,000. In most of sub-Saharan Africa is is under USD1000
In many cases the statistics are miss leading. The mac has a large percentage in schools, but in average users homes i have not seen a single mac in a while.
Statistics are wrong almost by definition and can always be twisted to support a someone’s certain viewpoint.
As a total opposite to your experience I’ve seen a few Macs at friends but never one at school. The irony is that if both of us would do statistics of this we would come to very different concluions =)
1) Statcounter is not a reliable way to sample the ownership of computers in a country. The problem here is not statistics, but their garbage data.
2) Your reliance on your own anecdotal experience is not better.
I have only seen 2 Macs in my whole life, whereas I keep seeing Windows PCs all the time. A whopping two Macs over almost 30 years ain’t much. So yeah, I don’t really know if these statistics can be trusted..
Sweden here too. Don’t know anyone falling for Macs
I have seen several people, both friends and family, starting to go Mac here in Sweden after the iPhone started to get a foothold. I have even seen an iPad on the bus in Uppsala once, but still no other tablet.
There are very few Apple dealers in Australia. Macs are very rarely used in education settings and almost non-existent in business. I find it impossible to believe that OSX has a 14% share of the Australian market.
I assume that OSX and iOS figure have been combined to get this result.
The Mac usually have poor international language support.
This is not a problem in English talking countries (US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, …). The other top countries are multilingual countries like Switzerland where people are used to things not localized and very small countries where people are also used to have things not localized (Hollywood movies not translated, computers with foreign keyboard, etc)
I don’t know if that has an impact on those statistics but this is what I have noted.
It was a case 4 years ago. There wasn’t for example polish version of MacOS X. From 10.5 (Leopard) there is. It’s system wide and complete. And polish version wasn’t the only one which took of with Leopard.