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Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

Quick Google search indicates Windows still holds a 74% market share. Apple has a long way to go before they are really crunching on Windows in the general market. Hardware superiority does not guarantee success, for many people what they are already comfortable with is fine.

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Windows may still dominate, but 75% is far below the 90% it was 10 years ago, while MacOS has nearly doubled in the same timeframe.

As someone who can remember this never changing, that's a pretty steep slope...

Oh it is far from nothing to be certain. And as Netflix's recent loss of subscribers and subsequent drop in stock price showed nothing is forever. But I'd still need to see the drop continue for a bit longer before I full on expect Microsoft to be in trouble.

Mind you, I would like to see them follow in Apple's footsteps on the train the M1 is creating. It certainly makes it FEEL like there is more runway down this path then Intel's, with caveats for potential hardware vulnerabilities like specter that simply haven't been found yet on Apple silicon to inhibit optimizations.

I think at this point Windows market share could go to 0, and while it'd hurt, with Office 365, Azure, Xbox, etc., I think microsoft is sufficiently diversified to survive that.

I assume what you refer to is this

https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

If you look at the trend, macOS is gaining worldwide market share while Windows is steadily dropping.

And macOS share in USA has already reached close to 25%.

It's behind a paywall for me.

Right, but for Apple to gain share in the rest of world like they have in the US, they need to drop prices, and that'd hurt their margins, including in the US if enough people buy cheaper foreign macs (which is definitely a thing, in my western european country there's a couple of somewhat popular retailers selling imported US laptops which are cheaper than local SKUs)

> Windows still holds a 74% market share

Note that is for desktop PCs: many people don’t own a PC/laptop so the market share is far far lower than that, especially outside of rich countries. Microsoft is now primarily just business software?

According to StatCounter, macOS only has 15% of the global desktop market share.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

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