Mac OS surges towards 10% market share

Mac OS X is on the verge of breaking through the 10% market share barrier, according to new research.

Mac OS X commanded 9.93% of the operating system market in January, reports Net Applications, which bases its figures on the operating system used to access the internet.

The Mac market share was as low as 7.38% last April, but a surge in Mac usage over Christmas has pushed the operating system to the brink of double figures.

Christmas also saw a spike in the usage of the iPhone/iPod touch. They accounted for 0.48% of the operating system market in January, up from 0.1% at the beginning of last year.

Windows 7 weekends

The figures also reveal a healthy interest in Windows 7. The beta OS had achieved a market share of 0.23% by 31 January, despite only being released midway through the month.

“Similar to Windows Vista, Windows 7 usage share is showing a pattern of being much higher on weekends than on weekdays,” Net Applications notes, reflecting the fact that most people will be running the next-gen OS on home rather than work machines.

Overall Windows market share continues to decline, however. Windows accounted for 88.26% of the market in January, down from 91.50% in January 2008.

Linux drop-off

Linux market share is also on the wane. The influx of netbooks pre-installed with Linux pushed the various flavours of the open-source OS to a market share peak of 0.93% in August 2008.

However, that share has been slowly ebbing away again over the past few months, as netbook manufacturers increasingly revert to Windows. Linux is now down to 0.83% – a modest increase of around 0.2% on the same time last year.