Is OS X more reliable than Vista? The numbers don't lie.

When you have a computer problem, what’s the first thing you do? Okay, after you pound on the keyboard and curse at the tech gods. Of course the first thing you’re going to do is Google you issue and try to find a fix. So it only makes sense that the more searches there are for an issue, the more people have that issue. Conversely, the less searches, the less prevalent is that particular problem. Therefore, if one were to contrast two sets of search trends, one could see which of the two were more common. So that’s what we’ve done... sort of.

We’ve taken common, non-platform-specific computer issues that would be searched for and looked at the Google Trends over the past 12 months, comparing the frequency that the search involves the term “Vista” and “OS X.” Just to be safe, we also did all the searches with Vista against the term “Leopard,” and it should be noted that every result was identical to the results of the OS X search.

Now, before we get into this: According to Marketshare, as of April, OS X’s marketshare was 7.38% -- roughly half of Vista’s 14.57%. Therefore, if issues across the platforms are roughly equal proportionately, OS X’s results should be roughly half of Vista’s. Well, once you see the numbers, you’ll see that we could have broadened the search to the entire 90% marketshare of all combined Windows versions and the disproportion of the installed user base still wouldn’t make a difference.

The trend searches (in all charts, Vista is represented in blue, OS X is represented in red):

(OS) Crashes:

With this one, we thought we’d start off with the big one and see what OS was all-out crashing the most.

(OS) Hangs:

Here, we thought we’d increase the chances of a more evenly-matched result by searching for a less critical problem. Maybe we need to dig deeper.

(OS) Help:

It seems even looking for general help is uncommon for OS X.

(OS) Sucks:

Sometimes people get fed-up with their OS and just want to find people to commiserate with. Well, some people.

Finally, we thought we’d look into how may people were ready to take decisive action and downgrade their OS. At this point, the figures were unsurprising.

Downgrade (OS):


Even considering that there are no specific numbers given by Google, it's hard to argue against zero being the lower number. Anyone else have some interesting Google Trends that stack OS X and Vista against one-another?