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Is there publicly available data somewhere with estimates on the number of users of each Mac OS X version? Particularly for the major releases (10.6.* Snow Leopard, 10.5.* Leopard, ...)?
I am writing a new application and am wondering whether it's still worth the effort of supporting pre-Leopard versions of Mac OS X, mostly Tiger. I am using Sparkle with the option of tracking system profiles with every update check, but as the application is still in early 0.* releases the number of users so far is so small it's hardly statistically relevant. The application is built to support Tiger and up, but I have not yet seen a Tiger user in the system profiles yet.
I realise there are some other factors at play too besides the number of users to decide whether to still support an older release. For example, I waited a long time to upgrade to Leopard myself, and at some point I got so used to seeing "requires at least Mac OS X 10.5" that I stopped looking for new applications altogether. I expect that's similar for anyone else still using Tiger.
Still, would be nice to have the data. Also just out of curiosity ... anyone seen someone still using Cheetah lately? ;)
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Since Apple's macOS Catalina (10.15) was released in October 2019, it did not take long until it became the most used version of macOS. In December 2021, macOS Catalina obtained 81.7 percent of macOS share worldwide.
It's possible to install two different operating systems and dual-boot your Mac. This means you'll have both versions of macOS available and you can choose the one that suits you on a day-by-day basis.
Adium (the open source chat client) publishes their Sparkle update data. This may be a good approximation of the market share of each Mac OS X version, as well as CPU types and Mac model. Just proportionate the percentages with the total number of Mac OS X users (about 9% of personal computer users) and you should be able to get a fairly good ballpark figure of the number of users of each OS.
Of course if Google publish their home page's browser-agent statistics, it will be a more accurate estimate. But too bad that isn't happening (anybody at Google reading this? ;-) )
I hope this helps.
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This question comes up reasonably often, and the best data is probably Sparkle stats, which is no doubt slightly skewed towards more tech-savvy users. Of course, this may be fine if that's your target market!
OmniGroup also provides stats from their updater: http://update.omnigroup.com/ The numbers are quite different to Sparkle's, and the graph of users over time indicates a slow decline for 10.4 (30%), a fast decline for 10.5 (25%), and a fast uptake of 10.6 (45%).
Finally, http://macosxhints.com has run a few polls recently about OS version and hardware type:
Their numbers are similar to those from Sparkle, although they are self reported. Most interestingly though, they show 45% of users who still own/use a PPC Mac, and just over 7% have Hackintoshes.
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