The  MacTotals  between 1997 through 1999 can be found at 

http://www.lowendmac.com/musings/apple99.shtml

. Here are more numbers gleaned from 

Apple s PR Department 2000 through 2004 from 

http://paste.lisp.org/display/662

. Those were 

table ized from 

http://www.apple.com/pr/library

, which then got us up through 3Q 2005. 

Fudge Factoring 

There could very well be over 85 million Macs in use today around the world, but I created an 

arbitrary 20% attrition rate and  real  numbers may reveal themselves soon enough.  We can't 

factor just Safari browser numbers and because not all Macs are online (many folks are still 

using pre Mac OS X on their systems i.e. Mac OS 7 through Mac OS 9), or are left on all the 

time. If we factor in 2 or 4 or more people using most of those machines, than we have a whole 

lot more folks out there than we have previously been counting. Than again, there are folks who 

have kept their older machines and I've seen storage rooms stacked full of used older Macs (see 

Retiring and Recycling later) and even seen folks use them as high tech furniture, so even 

though the older boxes may be  retired , they are still being used somehow (Mac Aquariums for 

example). But for the purposes of this research, we can't really count those as being  in use by 

Users , now can we? (Older Macs don't become boat anchors, they become fish holders.) 

My Figures 

My best guestimate is that there is somewhere around 80 or so million Mac users worldwide 

today. I bet the actual numbers of users are higher. Why?  

   More than one person uses any given Mac if educational facilities are taken into account 

with labs.  The best anecdotes come from there as labs are outfitted with a majority of 

non Macs that are left idle, while there is a waiting list for the Macs to be used in those 

same labs.  

   Mac machines tend to last 10 years or longer. And older systems still have value on eBay.   

   Apple has sold a lot more Macs since 1997. 

   Quite a few Macs are used in institutions and enterprises to be used in kiosks, clusters 

and server farms. 

o  17% of Enterprises with more than 250 employees are using Macs. 

o  21% of Enterprises with over 10,000 employees are using Macs. 

o  14% of those are using Apple's Server software. 

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/07/21/osx/index.php?lsrc=mwrss

Now let's get a little crazy ourselves. Say that none of the pre 1997 machines were being used 

(and that's not accurate at all). So snap, we erase 60 million systems out of circulation just like 

that. That still leaves us with nearly 30 million machines (see the column in the table, Running 

Total Newer Machines).   

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 7 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8