“OS X Mavericks’ uptake slowed significantly in December, putting a crimp on Apple’s plans to move customers to the new — and free — operating system,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “Data from Web metrics company Net Applications also showed a worrisome fragmentation of the Mac operating system market, with three older editions, including 2009’s OS X Snow Leopard, crowded around the 20 percent line, each accounting for between one-sixth and one-fourth of the user base.”
“The slowdown in Mavericks adoption last month was in contrast to the rapid uptake in November, when the free operating system upgrade vaulted from fourth place among the various editions to first,” Keizer reports. “At the end of November, 32 percent of all Macs tracked online by Net Applications were running OS X Mavericks, a 21-point increase over the month prior. In December, Mavericks gained just 5 percentage points, climbing to a 37 percent share.”
“Still, Mavericks’ December gain was twice that of OS X Mountain Lion in the second full month of its availability,” Keizer reports. “OS X Snow Leopard again resisted major defections, losing just 0.7 points in December to slip to 19.5 percent of all editions. Users of Snow Leopard have stubbornly stuck with their aged operating system — which may have already seen its final security update — in large part because it was the last version of OS X to let them run applications compiled for the PowerPC processor. Its successor, OS X Lion, also orphaned many Macs made before 2008.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Older Macs wil get upgraded in due time. There are a lot of white plastic MacBooks and other Macs out there that simply cannot run Mavericks.