Mac OS X: Intel vs. PPC marketshare

Question

I was looking at my plugins, and ended up looking at Silverlight on several Mac systems.

What I noticed (from Wikipedia), was that only Silverlight 1 runs on PPC. Without knowing about the technical details and trade-offs, I was surprised. On its face, if you build Silverlight 1 for PPC and Intel, would it have been hard to continue to support both chipsets?

So, assuming this was a decision based on marketshare, I tried to search for information on the Mac OS PPC vs. Intel marketshare, but could not find anything on point.

Does anyone here have an idea what the ratio is? It seems like the most important architectural/product decision you would make for a Mac OS X product.

Answer 1

I guess the stats you get will vary a lot by source. Here are the Software Update Statistics from the Omni Group. Choose hardware then CPU type. They have over 90% intel.

Even if you get different values elsewhere, keep in mind that:

1. No new PPC Macs are coming into the market.
2. Apple itself has abandoned PPC support in Mac OS X 10.6.

So if you're developing a new product, should you support PPC?

• If your code is 10.6-specific, then you can't.
• If you're writing low level intel-specific code, then don't bother.
• If you're working with 10.5 code, then PPC support is just a compile flag away, here, it can't hurt.

Just bear in mind that a user who doesn't upgrade his hardware and operating system is also unlikely to upgrade your software.

Answer 2

There are lots of PPC Macs out there, but given that they would be generally in the hands of less tech-savvy users, it's hard to get exact stats.

Adium releases stats obtained from Sparkle users; they indicate roughly 11% PPC users when you look at 2009 stats - http://www.adium.im/sparkle/?year=2009&week=*&graph=bar

kch's thought process seems correct to me. PPC support if it's a compile-flag away, otherwise don't bother unless you get requests (and hopefully money-making requests at that.)

Also worth pointing out from those stats that 10.6 support is about 44% of the Sparkle users, with 10.4 still at 11% and the bulk of the rest being 10.5.

Edit: a new survey, done on popular site macosxhints.com, reveals very different numbers. Now this is definitely subject to self-selection bias, so I hope that he posts the site stats to compare against after the survey is complete, but right now it lists:

• 29% have only Intel Macs
• 2% have only a Hackintosh
• 5% have both (netbook users?)
• 8% have only PPC Macs
• 36% have PPC and Intel