One of the bloggers over at Daily Kos has an interesting analysis of the age old Mac vs. Windows decision, but this time with an eye towards how that may correlate to political leanings:
…the share of the market held by Apple’s OS X operating system looks tiny beside Microsoft’s behemoth. It’s even smaller on conservative web sites. When it comes to visitors to Instapundit, OS X visitors make up only 2-3%, suggesting that conservatives are less likely to go for the Apple brand than the general public. On the other hand, Daily Kos statistics show that between 15% and 25% of visitors to this site are using Macs — an astounding 5x times the general population of these computers. If you were at YearlyKos last time around, you could spot more Macs at breakfast than you’d find in an Apple store.
We see a similar phenomenon here on the Walker site. Roughly a quarter of our visitors are on a Mac, which is quite high compared to the general browsing population. There are a couple likely reasons for this, (all speculation, mind you). There is a booming design culture here in the Twin Cities, and the Walker is a cornerstone of it. Designers use Macs. We have an extensive educational outreach program, and education tends to use the Mac. And we have gallery 9, an online gallery of internet-based art, which appeals to other internet-based artists, who also tend to use the Mac.
What does it mean to us in the end? Not a whole lot. We design all our sites to be platform agnostic, which is what any good web developer should do.
Just like you said Macs tend to be used for more artsy, design, education, and creative purposes. Windows machines at least started out as business tools. Obviously I am grossly over-simplifying here. These pursuits are more likely to show political correlations than computer choice. So I think that is why you are seeing the numbers like this.
Here at the Science Museum 8-9% of our online visitors are using a Mac. Whatever that means?? This sounds like something the Pew Internet and American Life Project needs to look into.
Comment by bryan kennedy — February 15, 2007 @ 4:47 pm
I don’t know what you’ll have to pry from my cold, dead hands first: my Mac or my Ronald Regan biography. I was raised in an all Mac culture, didn’t use Windows until I went to college. What a piece of crap that is.
Comment by Kevin from Minneapolis — March 2, 2007 @ 2:58 pm