The stats are interesting but do not warrant such a condescending/misrepresentative view; they could easily be twisted around, for example, to say
- Macos has broken browsers and doesn't cache, resulting in multiple font downloads per website browsing session.
- Macos use computers differently? Do they refresh the page multiple times racking up a download count?
The first odd thing about the stats is Linux's share; with a 2% market share it's racked up 10T downloads. A major part of that is Android based browsers, but a decent part of that will be Linux desktop users, developers, automation tests and so on. Overall we should expect users' browsing habits playing a part; there may be a large shift towards mobile/tablet web consumption and reduced desktop web consumption causing a stats skew.
There are Windows machines for high end and low end, but macOS machines only for high end. Low end includes all your grandmas, unused workstations, and people apathetic about computers because they don't use them much. All your laptops kept folded under dorm beds and used only for assignments.
The same effect shows up to a greater degree on mobile, where Android has something like three times iOS’s units sold yet the same amount of mobile traffic and half as much app store revenue.
Webpages in non-latin alphabets probably use way less fonts from Google Fonts. And Macs are way more popular in English-speaking countries than anywhere else.
Windows computers cost half as much, more or less, for the same specs so the replacement rate is probably much higher. Like for the same price you can buy a PC laptop every 2 years vs 1 Mac laptop every 4 years.
When I worked at Apple, the plastic MacBooks outsold everything else because they were cheapest. It was weird that we did all our power/performance benchmarks on a $2000 15" MacBook Pro when they only made up 10-15% of Mac sales.
From that time, we also knew that Macs were extremely popular for home use, IIRC something like 30-40% penetration, but people were using Windows for work or being given a Windows laptop from work for personal use.
One of the reasons Apple never made a Netbook was that it was an inferior good. People, when asked, prefered a larger screen and trackpad but couldn't afford it. The bottom-tier 11" MacBook Air and the iPad were a response to upsell that demand.
I don't follow. Precisely because we are talking about the global usage you have to consider webpages in non-latin alphabets which increase the ratio of Macs for latin alphabet countries.
I think it's almost certainly due to average browsing habit differences between Mac and Windows users. The Mac userbase is likely wealthier on average and more likely to be in a design/product/publishing profession, which influences the type of website they would frequent.
Looks like Macs have roughly a 17% share of the windows + mac total requests. The overall market share per wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...) is something like 7% for Apple.
Fonts are probably used by most "normal" computer users in some way so I wonder where that difference comes from
- windows breaks faster and must be replaced more often, increasing the number of sold windows systems per year
- windows users use computers differently? Must be a pretty big thing to cause such a difference
- more windows systems not connected to the internet?
I kinda doubt that the typical enterprise windows setup with strict firewall rules etc. will have a meaningful impact on web fonts and IE 6+ seems to support google fonts (https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_browsers_are_su...)
Any ideas?