Mac OS X Lion adoption seems to have plateaued according to report

Apple’s Mac OS X Lion was launched some time in the middle of the year and was met with both praise and criticism, much like everything else in life. However it appears that in this case, the critics may have been on to something as web as publisher Chitika has released data about Mac OS X Lion which is short of troubling.

Prior to OS X Lion, OS X Snow Leopard managed to command a pretty impressive adoption rate at 56%. Next up was Leopard at 22%, and coming in third is Lion at a meager 16%. Now we could argue that Lion is still relatively new and that there’s still time for it to grow and command the same adoption rate as Snow Leopard, but the graph pictured above seems to suggest otherwise.

Based on the graph above, it appears that the adoption rate of OS X Lion seems to have plateaued. Prior to this, OS X Lion had been averaging a growth of about 4.05% a month, but now it seems that the growth seems to have stopped. Chitika offers their reasoning behind this poor rate of adoption.

“One of the most frequent complaints about Lion is that the user interface behaves too much like iOS, the operating system on iPhones, iPods, and iPads. While iOS has proven successful on Apple’s product mix, this look isn’t a winning formula on computers. Other notable issues include Wi-Fi stability, poor battery life on MacBook Pros, and an inverted “natural scrolling” function.”

Of course this is by no means a definite indicator that OS X Lion is doing badly and that Chitika’s graphs should be taken as a serious measure of OS X Lion’s success, but some of the flaws of Lion that they pointed out are sentiments that are shared by many of Lion’s early adopters. What do you guys think? Is OS X Lion really doing as badly as Chitika’s report seems to suggest?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: Apple Inc, Mac (Apple), os x lion, report