I think this slide best shows why I am not a huge fan of Apple.

Good for Apple that they shipped 6 million copies of OS X Lion in 2 weeks but that graph is very misleading and more importantly irrelevant. “User Adoption”, that’s not a metric often touted by companies for one good reason, it doesn’t show much. What would be more useful is to show how “units shipped” compares between OS X Lion and Windows 7 to really represent where people are spending their hard earned money. The revenue from the sales of OS X Lion versus Windows 7 would also be of more use. Tom Warren has pointed out some good reasons why Windows 7 adoption is lower than OS X Lion even if for no other reason than Windows’s market share is about 20 times as large.

If we take Microsoft’s often mentioned average for Windows 7 sales as 7 a second then in two weeks we see that Microsoft will have sold about 8.5 million copies of Windows 7. That you might not think is that impressive but it is about 40% more sales than OS X Lion. Equally within the first two weeks of OS X Lion’s availability there would have been many early adopters installing the latest Service Pack OS update so that graph has probably petered out some what now, note that Apple aren’t showing what the adoption rate is now after 12 weeks on the market. Equally when Windows 7 was first on sale there would have been a lot of early adopters installing the latest version of Windows. In fact 4% of all PCs worldwide accessing the internet were running Windows 7 within two weeks, which would have been somewhere between 20 and 30 million PCs. I think that is a little more impressive than 6 million PCs. Bare in mind that Windows install base is well over a billion but many of those PCs wont connect to the internet.

The figure of 20 to 30 million PCs running Windows 7 within two week is backed up by Apple’s graph. If Windows 7 reached 2% of the Windows install base within 2 weeks, if that’s from the over one billion Windows PCs then Microsoft reached 20 million installs in the same time Apple achieved 6 million. That’s assuming a Windows install base of a billion, the figure is actually higher than that.

So whilst the graph looks impressive and Apple seem keen to show that they can “beat” Windows it really doesn’t show very much at all. 10% of a small number is an even smaller number. I’d actually be interested to know what the Service Pack User Adoption rate looks like for Windows 7, it’s probably similar, even if Service Packs from Microsoft are free.

I find it funny that politicians are hated the world over for their manipulation of statistics and yet Apple and its constant statistics manipulation almost seems to be revered by many on the net.

I’m sure that many other tech companies, and companies in general, manipulate statistics but I always find Apple to be far more blatant about it than most companies.

Image from Engaget,

• http://twitter.com/BillinghamJ James Billingham

  Isn’t the point of this to show how quickly Apple users update their products, because it’s such an easy and painless process, unlike that of Windows? Not to show actual numbers.