macOS Market Share Statistics 2026: Desktop Share, Versions and Regions

macOS market share is easy to get wrong, because the most quoted tracker splits Macs into two labels and most stats pages report only one of them. Counted properly, Apple’s desktop operating systems carried 18.3% of worldwide desktop web traffic from January to August 2026, against 74.9% for Windows, according to StatCounter. In the United States, the United Kingdom and Oceania, more than one desktop in four is a Mac.

This page collects the macOS market share statistics that can actually be traced to a measurement: StatCounter for OS-level share by region, Homebrew and TelemetryDeck for version adoption, the Stack Overflow survey for developers, Steam for gaming, Omdia and IDC for Mac shipments, and Apple’s own 10-K for revenue. Every figure links to its source, and the section on StatCounter explains why an earlier version of this article, and many others, understated the Mac at about 5%.

Key macOS market share statistics in 2026

Source: StatCounter Global Stats; Homebrew analytics; Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025; Steam Hardware and Software Survey; Omdia PC Market Pulse; Apple Inc. Form 10-K for fiscal 2025.

macOS vs Windows market share worldwide

Windows still runs three desktops in four, but the Mac’s slice has grown for most of the past 17 years. StatCounter’s yearly series, with its two Apple labels added together, shows Apple’s desktop share rising from 4.3% in 2009 to a peak of 20.0% in 2023, easing to 16.4% in 2025, and running at 18.3% for the first eight months of 2026, per StatCounter’s desktop OS page.

• Windows held 74.9% of worldwide desktop traffic from January to August 2026, down from 77.8% for full-year 2025 (StatCounter).
• The combined Apple share for the same eight months was 18.3%, made up of 11.2% reported as “OS X” and 7.0% reported as “macOS” (StatCounter).
• Linux reached 5.1% of desktop traffic in 2026 to date, its highest annual figure in the series, and ChromeOS held 1.7% (StatCounter).
• Over the twelve months to August 2026, the monthly average was 75.9% Windows and 17.8% Apple (StatCounter, monthly data).
• August 2026 alone recorded 63.0% Windows, 26.7% Apple and 8.8% Linux, a one-month swing far larger than any real change in installed PCs; treat it as a sampling anomaly until later months confirm it (StatCounter).
• Combined Apple share topped 20% for the first time in 2023, the year after the M2 MacBook Air launched, then fell back as Windows 11 upgrades and cheap Windows laptops recovered in 2024 (StatCounter yearly series).

If you are weighing the two platforms yourself, our Mac vs PC comparison covers price, software and longevity, and our Windows 10 editions guide explains what the October 2025 end of support means for the Windows side of this chart.

How to read StatCounter’s macOS numbers

StatCounter identifies operating systems from the browser’s user-agent string. Since 2020, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers on the Mac have reported a frozen version, “Mac OS X 10_15_7”, regardless of the real macOS release. StatCounter files that traffic under the label “OS X”, and files Safari and other browsers that report a newer version under “macOS”. Neither label alone is the Mac’s share; only their sum is.

That split is why so many pages, including the previous version of this one, claimed a macOS share near 5%: they quoted the “macOS” line and ignored the larger “OS X” line sitting beside it. In February 2025 StatCounter’s “macOS” label was still 0.0% while “OS X” was 17.1%; by mid-2026 the two labels were roughly equal.

The same defect breaks StatCounter’s version chart, which shows Catalina (10.15) at over 40% in September 2026 and carries StatCounter’s own note that Apple devices are “incorrectly reporting all macOS releases since Catalina 10.15 as Catalina 10.15”, per its macOS version page. Use StatCounter for the OS-level share and the sources in the version section below for version adoption.

macOS market share by region and country

Mac adoption tracks income and Apple’s retail footprint. Twelve-month averages smooth out StatCounter’s month-to-month noise, and on that basis Oceania leads the world at 31.2% Apple desktop share, followed by the United States and the United Kingdom at about 27%, while India and China sit below 10%.

• United States: Apple desktop share averaged 27.4% from September 2025 to August 2026, with Windows at 62.7%, per StatCounter’s US page.
• Oceania: 31.2% Apple and 64.2% Windows over the same twelve months, the highest Mac share of any region (StatCounter, Oceania).
• United Kingdom: 26.7% Apple against 66.6% Windows (StatCounter, United Kingdom).
• Europe as a whole: 19.2% Apple and 74.6% Windows, with Germany at 20.0% Apple (StatCounter, Europe and Germany).
• Japan: 19.2% Apple, the highest figure in Asia, against 77.0% Windows (StatCounter, Japan).
• Asia overall: 10.6% Apple and 84.1% Windows; China averaged 8.7% Apple with Windows above 90% (StatCounter, Asia and China).
• India: 7.4% Apple, 79.9% Windows and a Linux share above 10%, the lowest Mac penetration of any market listed here, per StatCounter’s India page.
• Africa (12.4%) and South America (11.8%) both posted single-month readings above 40% in August 2026, which no shipment data supports; the twelve-month averages are the numbers to quote (StatCounter, Africa and South America).

macOS version market share: Tahoe, Sequoia and Sonoma

Because StatCounter cannot see macOS versions, the best public measurements come from software that reports the real OS build. Homebrew, the package manager used on millions of Macs, publishes anonymized install analytics, and in the 30 days to September 14, 2026 macOS Tahoe (version 26) accounted for 61.4% of its macOS installs, per Homebrew’s OS version analytics. Sequoia (15) followed at 22.3% and Sonoma (14) at 7.8%.

• macOS Tahoe 26 ran on 61.4% of Homebrew Macs in the 30 days to September 14, 2026, a year after its release; over the trailing 365 days its share was 35.2% of all Homebrew installs, ahead of Sequoia at 26.1% (Homebrew analytics).
• The macOS 27 beta, code-named Golden Gate in Homebrew’s data, was already 2.8% of macOS installs before its public release (Homebrew analytics, 30 days).
• Ventura (13), Monterey (12), Big Sur (11) and Catalina (10.15) together were under 6% of Homebrew Macs, and High Sierra and Mojave rounded to zero (Homebrew analytics, 30 days).
• Within the current release, updates move fast: TelemetryDeck’s panel of apps showed macOS 26.6 as the most used version at the end of August 2026, at 54.3% of the versions it tracks, with 26.5 at 25.2% and the 27.0 beta at 1.3%, per TelemetryDeck’s macOS versions survey.
• In the same TelemetryDeck panel, every macOS 26 point release combined held about 87% of tracked devices, macOS 15 releases about 11%, and macOS 14.8 under 1% (TelemetryDeck, week ending August 31, 2026).
• Steam’s August 2026 survey listed macOS 26.5.2 as the most common Mac version among gamers at 0.66% of all Steam users, with 26.6.x builds arriving during the month (Steam Hardware Survey).

Both panels skew toward developers and engaged users, who update sooner than the general public, so treat these as the leading edge of adoption rather than the whole installed base. For Apple’s own view of the platform, its annual 10-K lists Tahoe as the current release and MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro as the hardware it ships on.

macOS share among developers

Developers are the Mac’s strongest professional audience. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 32.9% of respondents named macOS as a primary operating system for professional work, second only to Windows at 49.5% and ahead of Ubuntu at 27.7%, per the survey’s technology section. Respondents could pick more than one system, so the figures sum past 100%.

• 32.9% of developers use macOS for professional work and 32.7% for personal use, the smallest gap between the two of any operating system in the survey (Stack Overflow 2025, 31,569 responses).
• Windows shows the opposite pattern: 56.7% personal use but 49.5% professional, as work machines shift to Linux and macOS (Stack Overflow 2025).
• macOS accounted for 75.5% of all Homebrew installs in the 30 days to September 14, 2026, with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions making up the rest (Homebrew analytics).
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (16.8%) and other Linux (16.7%) together now rival macOS as a professional platform, which is where the Mac’s developer share is most contested (Stack Overflow 2025).

Our macOS developer statistics page goes deeper into tooling, Xcode and Apple silicon adoption.

macOS in PC gaming

Gaming is the Mac’s weakest segment by far. Valve’s Steam Hardware and Software Survey for August 2026 put macOS at 2.14% of Steam users, against 93.95% for Windows and 3.90% for Linux, per the Steam survey. The Mac’s Steam share fell 0.18 points in the month while Linux, lifted by the Steam Deck, kept climbing.

• macOS: 2.14% of Steam users in August 2026, down 0.18 points month over month (Steam Hardware Survey).
• Windows 11 alone ran on 70.97% of Steam machines and Windows 10 on 22.90% (Steam Hardware Survey, August 2026).
• Linux passed macOS on Steam and stood at 3.90% in August 2026 (Steam Hardware Survey).

The reasons, from Apple silicon game ports to the Game Porting Toolkit, are covered in our Mac gaming statistics page.

Mac shipments and Apple’s Mac revenue

Web traffic measures the installed base; shipments measure what is being bought now, and 2026 has been a strong year for the Mac. Omdia counted 7.3 million Macs shipped in the second quarter of 2026, up about 16% year over year, making Apple the fastest-growing top-five PC vendor in a market that shrank 3.6%, per Omdia’s July 2026 release.

Source: Omdia PC Market Pulse, July 9, 2026; shares computed from Omdia’s unit figures. Apple’s growth rate is derived from Omdia’s reported two-point share gain.

• IDC’s count for the same quarter had Mac shipments up 10.1% year over year to a 9.9% share of a 68.2 million unit market, with the MacBook Neo launch credited for the gain, as the firm summarized on its X account.
• Mac net sales reached $33.7 billion in fiscal 2025, up 12% from $30.0 billion in fiscal 2024 and $29.4 billion in fiscal 2023, per Apple’s Form 10-K.
• The Mac produced 8.1% of Apple’s $416.2 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue, behind iPhone ($209.6 billion) and Services ($109.2 billion) (Apple Form 10-K).
• The company attributed the 2025 increase to “higher net sales of laptops and desktops”, the first year since 2022 that both categories grew (Apple Form 10-K).

For the longer shipment history and Apple’s share by quarter, see our Apple Mac sales statistics page.

macOS share across all devices

Counted against every phone, tablet and console as well as every PC, the Mac is a much smaller platform. StatCounter’s all-platform figure for August 2026 put Android first at 38.6%, Windows at 26.7%, iOS at 19.1% and Apple’s two desktop labels at a combined 11.3%, with Linux at 3.7%, per StatCounter’s all-platform OS page. Its mobile and desktop systems together therefore reached about 30% of all web traffic that month.

macOS market share FAQ

Short answers to the questions readers ask most, all built on the same measurements as the sections above and anchored on the 18.3% combined Apple desktop share for 2026.

Is macOS market share growing in 2026?

Yes, but from a base that most stats pages understate. Measured correctly, Apple’s desktop systems carry about 18% of the world’s desktop web traffic and more than a quarter of it in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, and Mac shipments grew faster than any other top-five brand in the second quarter of 2026 while the market as a whole shrank.

The limits are just as clear: the Mac is a rounding error on Steam, a minority platform in Asia, and about 11% of traffic once phones are counted. Watch three numbers through 2027: whether StatCounter’s combined Apple share holds above 18% after the strange August 2026 reading, how quickly Homebrew Macs move to macOS 27, and whether Apple’s fiscal 2026 10-K extends the Mac’s double-digit growth.