14 DAY TRIAL // OS X Mountain Lion is installed on one in every ten Macs, according to research by Chitika Insights. It took OS X Lion three months to reach a similar figure, said the advertising company.
Chitika Insights reported about a month ago that Apple desktops running OS X 10.8 generated 3.2% of all Mac-based Web traffic.
“Since Mountain Lion officially turned one month old last Saturday, Chitika Insights revisited this study to see how quickly Mac users were adopting the latest operating system now that the novelty has begun to wear,” reports the metrics firm.
Sampling hundreds of millions of desktop ad impressions, followed by a compilation of a month’s worth of Web traffic, the Chitika team was able to assess market share distribution between all versions of Apple’s operating system, “both as a weekly average and a daily tally from the date of release until now.”
“Since the unprecedented traffic increase that occurred within the first two days post-release, OS X Mountain Lion has been steadily clawing its way upwards,” reports Chitika.
The growth continued past the first 48 hours since the OS’s debut, “plateauing at 5.65% on July 29th, a full four days post release.”
From August 20th through August 27th, Mountain Lion users generated an average of 9.61% of all OS X traffic.
Chitika points out that “the adoption rate has shown no signs of letting up,” adding that “By August 27th, Mountain Lion usage constituted 10.3% of all Mac-based desktop impressions seen over the extensive Chitika ad network.”
The analytics company cautions that Mountain Lion’s adoption rate might stall once the hype wears out, “but should its rate of growth continue, the new OS will exceed Lion’s mark within three weeks,” Chitika estimates.
The second graph on the left (click to enlarge) shows that Apple’s most popular desktop OS remains OS X Snow Leopard (version 10.6), the only Mac OS that is advanced enough to handle today’s apps and web standards yet doesn’t incorporate all the iOS oomph delivered in Lion and Mountain Lion that not all users appreciate.
