timcookwindows

Hey, it wouldn’t be an Apple conference without a fun jab at Microsoft to kick things off!

Apple CEO Tim Cook upheld the tradition this morning during his opening talk at the WorldWide Developers Conference in San Francisco, pointing out that Apple’s OS X Mavericks has been installed more than 40 million times since its release in October, representing more than 50 percent of Apple’s desktop customer base.

“This is the fastest adoption ever of any PC operating system in history,” Cook said, to laughter from the crowd. “I knew somebody was going ask, so I decided to make a chart. Well, it turns out, Windows 8 shipped about a year before Mavericks, and it’s at 14 percent. Need I say more?”

Well, yes: The Windows PC market is many times the size of the Mac market — with about 70 million units shipped in the first quarter, for example, compared to about 4 million Mac shipments in the same time period.

As an installed base, there are more than 1.5 billion PCs around the world, compared with 80 million Macs, extrapolating from Cook’s remarks today.

In other words, the comparison isn’t entirely fair. But it is worth a few laughs.

The live stream from the event is available here on Apple devices and the Safari browser.

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