OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Tops Lion as Most Popular Mac Operating System

[MacRumors]

According to Web analytics firm Net Applications (via Computerworld) Apple's OS X Mountain Lion is now the most popular version of OS X, just five months after its July 2012 release.

During December, 32% of all Macs that went online were running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Usage of Lion, the previous iteration of OS X, dropped from 30% to 28%.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, first introduced in 2009, remains widely used despite its age. As of December 31, it still represented 29% of Mac Internet usage. Snow Leopard remains for sale on the online Apple Store and has been lauded for its stability.

Easily accessible and reasonably priced upgrades have always enticed Apple users to embrace operating system updates. Apple famously boasted about selling a million copies of OS X 10.7 Lion in its first day of availability, and Mountain Lion also saw rapid adoption numbers.

Net Applications collects its data by tracking browser usage of 160 million monthly visitors from around the world on approximately 40,000 websites, offering a picture of the active user base of browsers and platforms at any moment.

Article Link: OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Tops Lion as Most Popular Mac Operating System

[markfc]

Snow Leopard is still high because apple are dicks for dropping core duo support...

[Lesser Evets]

If Apple had a work-around for M-Lion on older Macs, they'd be having a lot less Lion users and a bit more cash.

Damn it.

[FSMBP]

Not a fan of this yearly desktop OS update. Devs are taking long to update their apps for the latest OS; by the time they do update, Apple announces a beta of the next version of OS X. (I'm not blaming Devs - I can't imagine them wanting to support multiple OSes within such a short timeframe)

I'm not saying pull a oldschool Microsoft and go 5 years between releases, but a 18-24 month schedule seems easier on consumers and Devs.

[KPOM]

Originally Posted by markfc

Snow Leopard is still high because apple are dicks for dropping core duo support...

I'm guessing it is the lack of support for PowerPC apps. People will older Macs continue to use older versions of the OS. However, I don't fault Apple for using OS upgrades to try to prod users to get new machines.

[Asclepio]

snow leopard still the best

[maxwelltech]

LOL Lion is now less popular than Snow Leopard despite being newer. Kind of like the relationship between Windows Vista and XP.

[charlieegan3]

Hang in there olde snow leopard.

[notabadname]

I'm still waiting on Xerox to update my print driver to support 10.8. Until then, I am stuck. I really don't need to "brick" my printer.

[mrsir2009]

They should have put Tiger on that graph as well

[Radio]

Interesting how nobody speaks of fragmentation

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by maxwelltech

LOL Lion is now less popular than Snow Leopard despite being newer. Kind of like the relationship between Windows Vista and XP.

Probably because most of the people that upgraded to Lion would also upgrade to ML. Those that didn’t upgrade from SL to Lion will likely never upgrade until they get a new computer.

[DaveN]

Does anyone else here have a hard time remembering the order of the OSes? Off the top of my head, I can tell which is 10.8 by the look of the graph but 10.7 or 10.6?

[Obi-Wan Kubrick]

I'm still using Tiger and I love it. Although my iMac can only run up to Leopard.

[weing]

Since Lion was little more than a poor performing beta of Mountain Lion, one wonders why anyone would still be using it period.

[baryon]

Despite OS X versions becoming worse every time, people are still buying them without any exceptions. This ain't gonna make Apple work harder is it!

Okay exception is Mountain Lion: they learnt from their awful, horrible, silly, stupid mistakes in Lion and fixed most of them. But it's still not as good as Snow Leopard was at the time.

I really hope they stop releasing operating systems every year and instead concentrate on reducing the number of stupid features and making a solid, stable, reliable system with a focus on consistency, like it used to be with Leopard and Snow Leopard.

[AppliedMicro]

If I could get Messages (incl. iMessage), Siri/Voice Dictation and maybe AirPlay mirroring (though I could do without) on a Quad-Core Mac mini, I'd be gladly running Snow Leopard.

It's still by far the most stable and compatible OS X release (despite the trouble with App Store versions of iLife/iWork, which cannot be installed on Snow Leopard).

[Mainsail]

We just changed from Snow Leopard (Which I really liked) to Mountain Lion when I updated our 5 year old Mac with a 2012 Mac Mini. I was concerned, but the transition was very smooth. We had already updated to the latest version of Quicken and Office, so that definitely helped.

My wife is still getting used to the scrolling, but when I showed her that it could be easily reset in preferences, she decided to go ahead and adapt to the new convention.

I really like photo stream, airplay, reminders, and other features that come with the OS. All in all, we are pretty happy with ML.

[FSMBP]

Originally Posted by mrsir2009

Probably because most of the people that upgraded to Lion would also upgrade to ML. Those that didn’t upgrade from SL to Lion will likely never upgrade until they get a new computer.

That doesn't make any sense. You can make that same exact assumption going with Snow Leopard to Lion. And seeing as how Mountain Lion dropped compatibly for Core Duo Macs, those people with Lion couldn't update past to Mountain Lion (therefore, Lion's share wouldn't drop).

It just says a lot of Snow Leopard. It was Apple's first major release that's major feature was speed (which I made a thread of those forum about my update from Leopard to Snow Leopard - it was significantly faster). Apple needs to focus on speed and stability again.

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by DaveN

Does anyone else here have a hard time remembering the order of the OSes? Off the top of my head, I can tell which is 10.8 by the look of the graph but 10.7 or 10.6?

10.6 is Snow Leopard, and 10.7 is Lion

[Xenomorph]

Originally Posted by mrsir2009

They should have put Tiger on that graph as well

Snow Leopard > Tiger > Mountain Lion

[unobtainium]

Originally Posted by weing

Since Lion was little more than a poor performing beta of Mountain Lion, one wonders why anyone would still be using it period.

In many ways Mountain Lion is a poor performing beta of Mountain Lion.

[Greg.]

Snow Leopard baby

[mrsir2009]

Originally Posted by weing

Since Lion was little more than a poor performing beta of Mountain Lion, one wonders why anyone would still be using it period.

I’d bet that the vast majority of systems running Lion are systems that shipped with Lion, whose owners don’t upgrade their computers.

[iAll]

Originally Posted by DaveN

Does anyone else here have a hard time remembering the order of the OSes? Off the top of my head, I can tell which is 10.8 by the look of the graph but 10.7 or 10.6?

Here is a historical link.
I started with OS 6 and DOS 4.1 and had a UNIX account before the term "browser". It sure is better today.