Chitika and GoSquared offer the usual analytics

Oct 27, 2014 09:48 GMT  ·  By
Apple SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, demoing Yosemite
3 photos
   Apple SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, demoing Yosemite

On October 24, Chitika Insights counted a 12.8% adoption rate for OS X Yosemite, Apple’s latest major version of the Mac operating system. That’s just 0.4 points more than Mavericks saw last year, but 7 full points more than Mountain Lion.

Another analytics firm called GoSquared offers its own take on the matter. These guys, however, are using real-time tracking tools to offer their analytics. The two methodologies have their ups and downs, but put them side by side and you can make a more educated guess regarding the current adoption rates.

Chitika’s numbers on October 24

Chitika released its report last week, on Friday. At the time it said, “To quantify the first week of OS X Yosemite adoption, Chitika Insights sampled tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian Mac OS X-based online ad impressions running through the Chitika Ad Network.”

“The data used within the analysis were drawn from impressions catalogued from October 16 through October 22, 2014. For comparison, the first week of OS X Mavericks and Mountain Lion adoption data we catalogued in previous years are overlaid on the same graph,” added Chitika.

The graph in question showed similar, first-week adoption rates for Mavericks and Yosemite, with the latter coming out on top with an extra half a point, and huge discrepancies between these two OSes and the previous Mountain Lion, which rolled out in 2012.

Unlike Mavericks and Yosemite, Mountain Lion was a paid upgrade valued at $19.99 / €17.99 per copy. Needless to point out, people are heavily incentivized to make a download if they don’t have to pluck out their wallet. So that’s Chitika’s numbers.

GoSquared says there are more

Another analytics firm called GoSquared offers a global tracker of the number of Yosemite computers actively accessing the web at any given minute. Their real-time tracking tool can say 26% of the Macs out there are currently on Yosemite, while the next minute that number can go all the way down to 16%.

But here’s the interesting part. We decided to give the tracker some time and see how it fares over the course of several hours. We noticed the adoption-o-meter jump from one figure to another every minute, but not once has it gone below 16 percent.

Couple that with Chitika’s 12.8 points recorded on Friday, and you could say Yosemite has been downloaded an awful lot this past weekend. These are mere guesses, of course, but the numbers strongly suggest that Yosemite is seeing adoption rates between 13 and 15 percent in its first 10 days in the wild.

One major advantage that Yosemite has had over Mavericks and other OS X releases before it is the public beta program that saw the OS installed on hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide prior to its public debut. That being said, Apple surely wouldn’t mind to see these numbers doubled next year.

Photo Gallery (3 Images)

Apple SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, demoing Yosemite
Chitika analytics says Yosemite is just above Mavericks after one week, and way above Mountain Lion in the same time frameAccording to GoSquared's real-time tracker, 26 percent of the entire Mac install base was running Yosemite at one point today
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