Someone was mentioning yesterday on Twitter that the Full HD resolution recently passed 1366x768 as the most used resolution and that there are now more users with 8GB RAM than 4GB RAM, which made me look at the graphs.
And while they are useful in some ways, it turns out they don’t really help answer some important questions for some of the categories, most notably number of cores, CPU clock speeds, RAM or display resolution.
Because in many cases, what’s interesting is not “how many people are using x”, but “how many people have at least x”. And the answers to that are actually more interesting than the factoids listed for these categories.
CPU Cores:
- factoid: “Nearly 70% of users have machines with two physical cores.”
- interesting fact: 97% or users have 2 cores or more. 37% have 4 cores or more.
CPU Speeds:
- factoid: “A quarter of users have processors with clock speeds between 2.3 GHz and 2.69 GHz.”
- interesting fact: 80% of users have clock speeds >= 2.0GHz. 66% >= 2.3GHz.
- relatedly: the categories are ranges, like “1.5GHz to 1.69GHz”, all adjacent, and there’s “Less than” the smallest range and “More than” the biggest range. What the hell is “Other”?
Memory:
- factoid: “The most popular memory sizes are 4GB and 8GB, with almost one-third and one-quarter of our Release users, respectively. The number of users with 2GB of memory is trending down.”
- interesting fact: 77% of users have 4GB or more. 50% have 6GB or more. 44% have 8GB or more.
Display resolutions:
- factoid: “Two display resolutions, 1366x768px and 1920x1080px, stand out as the most highly-used, with the latter showing an upward trend.”
- interesting fact: 87% have 1366x768 or more, 53% have 1600x900 or more, 42% have 1920x1080 or more… assuming Other is mostly larger resolutions.
BTW, when summing the data, the sum on a given date can go as high as 102%…