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Comment by fabrika | Hacker News Reader

Something must be very wrong with their methodology. I don't believe the total installed base is so volatile that the Mac share jumps from 7% to 9.57% then down to 6% within a single year.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpaf=&qpc...

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> Something must be very wrong with their methodology. I don't believe the total installed base is so volatile that the Mac share jumps from 7% to 9.57% then down to 6% within a single year.

Agreed. And it's by no means the first such example.

However, the numbers are based on unique visitors to a range of websites. The variation might reflect a wide variation in web accesses from different operating systems (though I doubt it), but it doesn't directly measure the installed base.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpaf=&qpc...

It's not that hard to believe. Their iPad + keyboard is cannibalizing their desktop.

I'd love to see iOS + Mac versus Windows + Mobile Windows

They weight users from different countries by CIA's total numbers of internet users in these countries. (https://www.netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx#Country ) So some country having a big share of internet users according to CIA and small and volatile number of users counted by Netmarketshare can be the reason. China has about 22% of internet users according to CIA. Is there a way to estimate how many are counted by Netmarketshare?

I'm actually very curious to find out how that will turn out in the long run because another source of the same kind definitively show quite a different trend for MacOS (and IMHO more continuous & realistic) : http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-ww-monthly-201512-201612

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