Mavericks Adoption Rate Nearly Four Times Greater Than Mountain Lion

Earlier this week, Apple didn’t surprise many of us with the release of their new Mac OSX operating system, Mavericks. How they did surprise us though, was by releasing it right then, right there, and for absolutely free for anyone with a qualified (post 2006) Mac.

And since that announcement, ad company Chitika took it upon themselves to garner as many statistics as they could relating to mainstream adoption of the operating system. In fact, they did a fascinating job gathering stats on the adoption rate of iOS 7 as well.

The adoption results for Mavericks are not only impressive on their own, but they blow away the stats set by the launch of Apple’s previous OS, Mountain Lion.

To gather these statistics, Chitika “sampled millions” of North American ads that ran through their network on Mac OSX-based devices. The data was gathered between October 22 and October 23, and was compared against the numbers collected from Mountain Lion’s launch in the same precise window.

24 hours after the release of Mavericks, adoption rates were upwards of 5.5%, while the percentage of users still running Mountain Lion was roughly 1.6%. What took Mavericks one day to garner, it took Mountain Lion just under five days.

This can be attributed to a number of factors – there are very likely more Mac OSX users out there in 2013 than in 2012, more people are tuned to seeking upgrades for their product, and Mavericks is free of charge. Mountain Lion, when it released, was $19.99.

Whether or not users will continue to flock to Mavericks due to its $0 price tag, or will remain cautious but content with their Mountain Lion (or older) operating systems remains to be seen. But one thing’s for sure – Apple is looking to be no less than the computing software king. And if that means giving it all away free to make it so, as a tradeoff for selling more hardware, then they very well might be on to something.