iOS is beginning to take over Mac OS X in Web traffic share for at least one online ad firm. In a new report published on Friday, Chitika said that Apple's record phone and tablet sales have propelled iOS to surpass Mac OS X when it comes to Web requests to Chitika's ad network. Though it's unlikely these stats signal the downfall of the Mac, they do show that iOS is seeing strong growth on certain networks to coincide with its sales growth over the last several months.
First things first: Chitika's network mainly targets mobile devices and, as such, its data is skewed more heavily towards iOS than the rest of the Web at large. For example, when looking at Ars Technica's own user agent stats for the month of January 2012—mobile and desktop combined—we saw 22.93 percent of our users on Mac OS X and 5.76 percent on various iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, and iPod). When split out among those devices, the iPad grabbed the highest chunk at 4.85 percent of our total. So although some networks like Chitika are seeing a complete takeover of iOS compared to Mac OS X, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not necessarily representative of the entire Internet.
That said, Chitika analyzed its ad network traffic from August 2011 through February 2012 and found that iOS was on a steady growth trajectory—enough to converge upon Mac OS X in December and overtake it altogether in February. As of February, both operating systems were hovering around the 8 percent mark (iOS at 8.15 percent and Mac OS X at 7.96 percent).
"[I]s Apple on the edge of cannibalizing its potential desktop market by focusing on its mobile device product mix?" Chitika asked in its report. "The shift towards an on-the-go lifestyle could be driving mobile device purchases by the consumer, and thereby driving the corresponding increasing in mobile web usage."
Apple may indeed be cannibalizing its desktop user base with the proliferation of iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches, but if there's anything Apple isn't afraid of, it's self-cannibalization. In a 2007 Town Hall meeting with employees, then-CEO Steve Jobs told one employee that if there's any cannibalization of Apple products, he wants it to be by Apple and not other companies. Current CEO Tim Cook reiterated that sentiment recently in the company's conference call for the first fiscal quarter of 2012: "There is cannibalization, clearly, of the Mac by the iPad, but we continue to believe that there's much more cannibalization of Windows PCs by the iPad," Cook said on the call, "and there's much more left to cannibalize."
In the first fiscal quarter of the year, Apple reported a 128 percent year-over-year unit growth in iPhones (37.04 million devices sold during Q1) and a 111 percent unit growth in iPads (15.43 million), compared to a 26 percent unit growth in Macs (5.2 million during Q1). (Overall iPod sales were down, as usual, but Apple doesn't provide specific numbers for the iPod touch so it's difficult to extrapolate the iPod touch's unit growth.) Comparatively speaking, iOS devices are indeed outselling Macs by the truckload—the company sold more than seven times as many iPads last quarter than Macs—but Mac sales are still seeing better growth than the rest of the desktop PC industry as a whole.
It seems inevitable that one day in the far future we may see iOS converge upon Mac OS X in overall Web share—and not just from Chitika—but for the time being, Macs and PCs remain people's primary browsing machines. After all, what do you think people are using in order to browse Facebook at work?
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