Apple OS X Market Share Drops In Feb, As Vista Use Rises

A new month can mean only one thing: we're about to be overwhelmed with statistics about February.  Today it's good news for Microsoft and bad news for Apple; the former saw its OS market share rise 0.22-percent from January to 88.42-percent, buoyed by a relatively healthy jump in Vista use, while the latter saw OS X's share drop by 0.28-percent to 9.61-percent.

The figures have been compiled by Net Applications, who highlighted that Linux is still a few points away from taking just 1-percent of the market (at 0.88-percent) together with the fact that this is Apple's first market-share loss in over a year.  Interest in Windows 7 had climbed through the second half of January, only to slump a little through the following month to end February at around 0.16-percent (though weekend tinkerers push that up to 0.18-percent on Saturdays and Sundays).

Windows Vista climbed from 22.48 to 22.79-percent, while XP and Windows 2000 dropped 0.09 points and 0.04 points respectively to 63.67-percent and 1.33-percent of the market.  Apple, meanwhile, saw their US sales drop by 6-percent in January, a shift that could have pre-empted their falling OS market share.