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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

OS X: 21.14%

macOS: 8.6%

Yeah, if you believe this kind of stats it's on yourself.

Also why are you posting a random reddit link? It doesn't even match up the latest stats provided on the official source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

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It does match statcounter if you filter for North America.

Aren't macOS and OS X the same thing?

> Launch: Released in March 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah", replacing the classic > Mac OS.Name Change: Shortened to OS X starting with version 10.8 / 10.9 in 2012, and rebranded to macOS in 2016.

I think that's the GP's point. If the people who put this together are too lazy/uninformed/incompetent to combine those two categories into one (because yes, they are the same thing), why would I believe anything about their collection methodology?

Even if you assume OS X is 1999-2016 and macOS is 2016- then the numbers are still odd.

This is what Wikipedia has recorded.

I presume Chrome on Mac still reports OS X as its OS, even when running a newer version. It is such a ridiculous idea not to put that together.

It’s hard to trust StatCounter, or anyone presenting web traffic stats at this point, after they showed a large spike in Windows 7 users for a few months, before it suddenly disappeared. (Even better: the blogs reporting on it with a made-up conclusion that users were revolting against Windows 11.) Bots want to act like humans, they run client-side JS, and they use residential proxies.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/10/02/no-windows-7-isnt-g...

My understanding is that apple officially changed from OS X to macOS in 2020 with the launch of macOS 11, even though the branding changed a few years earlier.

Sort of. Apple half-heartedly changed their version numbers after 10.15, but there were times where they wrote both the 10.X and N+1.x versions elsewhere, so I think it's just generally a confusing mess with them now.

iPadOS masks itself as macOS/OS X (depending on where you look), so that doesn't help either.

We should really be able to downvote submissions... This analysis is clearly factually inaccurate. I am curious to know why OS X and macOS are showing up separately though

The thing is, there is an ongoing linux boom (the percentage doubled which means linux user base has effectively doubled too). But god help us in this AI-slop phase.

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