Top 10 Mac countries by market share (United States is #3)

Switzerland leads the pack with an estimated 17.61 percent Mac OS X market share, followed by Luxembourg and the United States with 15.79 and 15.36 percent local market share, respectively. This eyebrow-raising survey by uptime monitoring company Pingdom is based on desktop operating system market share data from StatCounter, obtained by tracking visitors on more than three million websites. Interestingly, Iceland comes ahead of Canada with a 15.18 percent Mac OS X market share versus 14.03 percent for Canada. The most Mac-friendly region is North America, followed by Oceania/Australia and Europe.

Another notable finding is that places like Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Finland did not make it into the top 10 countries. That’s weird, especially for the UK. In Asia, Africa and South America Apple’s platform enjoys even lesser visibility, struggling to garner even two percent market share. That’s bound to change at least in China where Apple is making notable strides with its flagship retail stores and high-profile iPhone 4 and iPad launches. The Mac is poised for a decent growth there based on the so-called halo effect that has folks switch to Macs due to their positive experiences with iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Don’t read too much from these numbers, though. This is a rough approximation that takes into account only online users observed at specific sites. IT’s by no means an accurate assessment of real-world data so it should be treated as such.