SaudiMac Saudi Apple Macintosh Users
Apple is enjoying a rapidly growing market share, while shipment of new devices growth outpaces PC market 3 to 1; Mac business sales growth nearly 8 times PC market according to Fortune. looking to the operating systems market share; apple has around 5%Â globally, which will rise to 6.7% if added the iOS to OS X. Safari users are little below 6% of global internet browsers- more details-. Numbers are a little bit higher for USA, but it is beyond the scope of our article. it seems interesting to know how we compare to the world in mac usage. I share with you here numbers from Qassim College of Medicine e-learning website which I have access to Google analytic data.
The numbers here cover the last week of December 2010, 6040 visits were recorded, almost all visits are from Saudi students, because it is a password protected website, I am not showing here data concerning the public website.
Data regarding visitors of Qassim College of Medicine
The data shows clearly that the users of Mac in the college are more than double the world usage. Mac users are nearly 10%. to me it is a very high number; given that we have no official Apple stores, rare promotions, lack of Arabic support and bad support, which is detailed in we want Apple in Saudi Arabia.
The iOS users are more than 5%; again 5 times the world usage. on an e-learning site, which is a serious site, means that users are enjoying the experience, surprising was that iPhone use exceeds ipads. every other mobile OS is below 1%. all Symbian devices from Nokia and others are below 0.5%. which indicates that fading glory of Nokia in the Saudi market.
The browser’s scene is no different, Safari has around 12% of our users, which doubles the global share that lies at 5.9%. the numbers also indicate that the increasing Apple share in Saudi Arabia is eating out of Microsoft products; yet the other parties are not affected.
Browsers share in Qassim College of Medicine
To summarize, from the numbers we have just mentioned, it seems that the number of Mac users in Saudi Arabia is much higher than we think especially college students, and it would continue to grow more in the near future. lastly; I really feel proud of the young generation and how they are rapidly adapting to modern technologies.
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well done, very interesting indeed
Interesting article.  I like your dataset (being password protected), and the strong inference towards Apple devices, operating systems and Safari being twice as popular as international metrics.  I also think your point about iPhones being more popular than iPads  could be to do with accessibility and price.  While the iPad is a great device, for a student with limited resources, an iPhone is a much better proposition.  Finally I would be interested to see how these metrics change over the next 12 months with iPad 2, a newer iPhone, and possibly a deployment of Apple Retail Stores through KSA and the wider GCC.
Thanks Noel for commenting, I am planning to update these data usages every year if I can, I will try to seek other sources to increase the sample size.