The 10 most Mac-friendly countries on the planet

Have you ever wondered where in the world Macs are the most popular? We have, so we decided to find out.

To do this, we examined OS market share numbers from across the world to identify the countries where Mac OS X has the highest market share.

You’d expect the United States, Apple’s home market, to lead the pack, but it’s not quite that simple.

The most Mac-friendly countries

We looked at desktop OS market share data from StatCounter, which is based on visitor stats from more than three million websites. To get up-to-date numbers, we focused on the month of February, 2011.

Doing this, we ended up with the following top 10 countries in terms of Mac market share: Switzerland, Luxembourg, the United States, Iceland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark and Singapore.

Above: Top Mac countries based on the OS market share in each country.

Just outside the top 10 you find countries like Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Finland.

The most Mac-friendly world regions

Now that we’ve looked at the Mac market share in individual countries, what about the market share in the different world regions?

Here it turns out that the United States makes a comeback. North America comes in at number one, closely followed by Oceania, then Europe as a distant third. The Mac has less than 2% market share in Asia, Africa and South America.

Above: Top Mac regions based on the OS market share in each country.

Another observation we’d like to add is that, as a subregion of Europe, Apple has made a very good impression in the Nordic countries. Three of the top 10 countries are Nordic, and all five Nordic countries are included in the top 20.

Conclusion

With the massive success of Apple products like the iPod, iPhone, and lately, the iPad, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Apple also sells personal computers. Apple’s Mac computers have never dominated the market in the same way, always being a distant second to Windows-based PCs, but they do sell well, and have become increasingly popular lately.

Now, after this post, you know where Apple has been most successful in building its Mac user base