* Snow Leopard Adoption Rate
Several Apple websites have been looking at their analytics and the seemingly rapid Snow Leopard adoption rate. While this is fairly normal for Mac users who also happen to read blogs, it stands in stark contrast to Windows users. A look at my own numbers (which are, admittedly, much, much lower than Gruber's) confirms that while Snow Leopard is the most popular Mac OS right now, XP is still the the most popular Windows operating system, by a whole lot. Windows 7 has yet to show up on any of my graphs, but that may be a Google problem.
Of course, the first thing you would note is that most businesses chose to ignore Vista, so a lot of traffic would be from XP. While this is true, and I'm willing to bet the Vista adoption rate is much higher for the general public, it doesn't account for a nearly three year old article by Harry McCracken in which the XP/Vista numbers are nearly identical to what I'm seeing today. In three years, have the numbers not changed? (Granted, comparing analytics like this is like comparing apples to pajamas in many cases.) Whatever the case, it seems quite remarkable that Apple users upgrade their OS, even with reports of it not being too impressive, pretty much on demand (hardware allowing). Even the price seems to not matter, as Gruber shows for 10.4 and 10.3. Below are my own analytics graphs. The first is total operating systems, the second is OS X only, and the third is Windows.
I need some help with my SpeedTest.net results. First, when I run the test on my iMac (or MacBook), the tests are consistent with what I expect, about 15 Mb/s down and 1.5 Mb/s up. This is the service level I pay for. But, when I run the app on my iPod Touch, the results are radically different. It says my download speed is 2 Mb/s with .8 Mb/s up. I've been running these tests daily for a few weeks now, and the results are always similar.
