Mac owners are upgrading to Apple’s OS X 10.9 at an increasing rate, with one report noting the latest OS is running on over 40% of active Macs. The rate of adoption far outpaces the operating system’s predecessor, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Ad network Chitika (via AppleInsider) reports that Mavericks now generates just over 40% of all North American web traffic coming through their ad services. Almost double the share of Mountain Lion at 21%.
OS X Mountain Lion took nearly 14 months to reach a 34% share, and had grabbed only a 26.8% slice of the web traffic pie seven months after its release. it should be noted that OS X 10.9 Mavericks is a free upgrade, while Apple charged for previous OS X upgrades.
Older versions of OS X are still in play, as 10.7 Lion and 10.6 Snow Leopard both accounted for 18% of Mac traffic, while 10.5 Leopard took 3%. The ancient OS X 10.4 Tiger OS is still out there on 1% of all machines, and “other OS X” takes the final one percent.
While the 40% adoption rate is an excellent one, Chitika notes the it is nowhere near iOS 7’s adoption rate, currently around 80%. A number of factors come into play in the gap, such as hardware incompatibility, the longer replacement cycles for Mac hardware, and user demographics.
Another factor could be the iOS update mechanism is simply more aggressive than its OS X counterpart, with built-in pop-ups and push notifications notifying users of available OS upgrades. That should cease to be a factor with such notifications debuting in OS X 10.9 Mountain Lion.
