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Comment by hexasquid | Hacker News Reader

So for every 7 Macs out there, there is one Windows 8 pc? Am I reading that right?

It can be hard to tell when you're immersed in the tech community, but OS X only has around 7.3% of the overall desktop OS market share[0]. So if Windows 8 took 1% of the market share, it would have 1/7th the share of OS X.

0: http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

Windows 8 hasn't been out on the market for more than a few months. Why is that surprising?

Not interested in taking sides, but it seems like OS X seems to migrate users on major version upgrades much faster than Windows.

Actually, every OS I can think of seems to have faster upticks in major versions than Windows. I can think of lots of reasons why that may be though.

OS X tends to break older apps IIRC. On the other hand, Windows has excellent backwards compatibility. And there's always the very long support period.

"OS X tends to break older apps"

[citation needed]

New versions of OS X don't break older apps. The opposite is true: new apps are often coded to take advantage of APIs in newer versions of OS X, those will not work on older versions of OS X.

My 2004 PowerPC notebook can't run the most current OS X, and few new apps work on PowerPC Macs. That's why I still use Adobe CS3 on that computer.

My 2009 Intel desktop Mac can run all apps ever released for OS X, even the ones compiled for PowerPC.

About Microsoft: Lots of drivers needed to be rewritten for Vista in order for peripherals to work. Internet Explorer 9 doesn't work on Windows XP and older. Internet Explorer 10 doesn't work on Vista and older. Modern UI apps don't work on Windows 7 and older.

> New versions of OS X don't break older apps.

A minor QuickTime version update halfway into Tiger's lifespan completely broke RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for a while. It wasn't an OS update, granted, but still irksome. Also, Mountain Lion throws a hissy fit if you try to run a Flash-based app with Gatekeeper enabled (even if you do the right-click->open workaround).

> My 2009 Intel desktop Mac can run all apps ever released for OS X, even the ones compiled for PowerPC.

Are you still running Snow Leopard, by any chance? http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/26/mac_os_x_lion_drop...

> A minor QuickTime version update halfway into Tiger's lifespan completely broke RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for a while.

Any insight into how that happened?

>"OS X tends to break older apps" >[citation needed]

Apps that dig deep into the OS are always at risk, VMWare Fusion is probably the best example of this. At my previous job there were issues with versions of Adobe CS (3 or 4, I can't really remember) and Snow Leopard.

Apple removed Rosetta from Lion, no PowerPC apps will run on anything after that.

Apple has a horrible backwards compatibility track record, Microsoft is significantly better in this respect.

For one, it costs $20 to upgrade your OS X. Windows 8 costs three times as much.

But to compensate for that a new version of OSX is released three times as often as a new version of Windows is.

my surprise (and the way I took hexasquids) was that widows 8 had already reached 1/7 of the amount of users of osx.

So far, but by this time next year that ratio will be very different.

Your distortion field is so concentrated! You realize the Mac OSX has been out for quite some time, while Windows 8 has barely a few months in the market, right?

I think it's time you clean out your fanboy lense.

Please don't call people "fanboy"s, or any other name for that matter, on Hacker News.

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