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.

Do you live in a country that loves Apple’s iPad? Most of us probably think we do, but we wanted to be able to tell you for sure. So even though we have written about the iPad many times before, it’s now time for us to tackle this hotly contested topic again.

Read on to find out, which countries are the most iPad-friendly.

Perhaps you live in one of them.

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Display resolutions are increasing every year, something that’s being taken to its extreme with the recent “retina display” trend that came with the latest iPad. The jump in onscreen pixels is massive, and such displays are soon bound to make their way into regular laptops and desktop displays, perhaps as soon as this year.

This development will have a profound effect on the size of the graphics resources necessary for websites, which ultimately will make websites bigger, more bloated and slower to download. That is, if we don’t change tactics.

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The juggernaut that is Facebook is quickly approaching 1 billion users, so the social network is growing at a rapid pace overall.

But if we look at some of the latest figures available, it would seem that Zuckerberg’s creation is not gaining users in every corner of the world.

In fact, in one country, Facebook has lost 16% of its users over the last six months, the equivalent of over 200,000 users. But in another country, Facebook has gained almost 17 million users over the same period.

What countries are we talking about, you ask? Read on and we’ll tell you.

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Developers who want a portable computer to code on, which is thin, light, sleek and yet powerful, may now be getting another option in an ultrabook from Dell. What makes the “Sputnik” ultrabook different is that it runs Ubuntu 12.04 Linux and it’s tailor-made for developers.

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, security, and other geeky topics.

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“Photograph what is close to you. Share it with the world!“ That’s one of the headlines on Aday.org, a global project that will attempt to document what goes around the world in one day.

This all takes place on Tuesday May 15, 2012, and Pingdom will be participating.

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