Apple’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion operating system has pounced out of the starting gate to capture 3.2 percent of the Mac market in just 48 hours. Ad network and tracking firm Chitika came up the figures by analyzing Web usage of on the company’s advertising network.
“Within the first 48 hours, usage rates for OS X 10.8 were already rivaling those of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger,” Chitika said in a statement. “While over 45% of users still operate on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, anybody using 10.6.6 or higher is eligible for the upgrade to 10.8.”
The chart below shows a 24 hour usage of Mac operating systems as of noon on July 26th. The largest segment of Mac users is still running Snow Leopard at 45.51 percent, with the next largest OS being Lion, at 34.97 percent. Leopard still commands 13.56 percent, while Apple’s brand new Mountain Lion has 3.21 percent.
Source: Chitika
The chart below shows a 24 hour rolling average that demonstrates a fairly steady climb in those downloading, installing, and actually using Mountain Lion.
Source: Chitika
In additional information released to AllThingsD, Chitika did some extrapolation that pegs the actual number of Mountain Lion copies downloaded at 2.11 million units. That figure is based on Apple’s claim during June’s World Wide Developers Conference that there are 66 million Macs in the wild, and 3.21 percent of 66 million is 2.11 million.