The adoption rate for OS X Mountain Lion has mimicked that of OS X Lion, but no operating system from the past three years has had a faster uptake than OS X Snow Leopard in 2009. While some users will continue to use OS X Snow Leopard, it seems that most users are choosing to adopt the most recent operating system, which will surely please Apple and its many developers. Snow Leopard refuses to go quietly into the night as Lion has, but that’s mainly because OS X 10.6 offered a number of advantages that current Mac operating systems can no longer boast, including support for Rosetta or PowerPC applications, even though they only worked on Intel-based Macs. OS X Snow Leopard is still the second-most-used Mac OS, according to Net Applications. Lion’s market share on the Mac lines dropped from 30 percent to 28 percent, while Apple’s 2009 Mac operating system, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, lost less than one percentage point in December, holding strong at 29 percent of all Mac usage. Most of the gains for OS X Mountain Lion were a result of users switching up from Apple’s previous OS X build, OS 10.7 Lion.
Five months after Apple released OS X Mountain Lion into the wild, the company’s eighth major build of the Mac OS X operating system is now also the most widely used version.Īccording to Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Net Applications, 32 percent of all Macs that went online in December were running OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which was released at the end of July.