How many computers use each Windows version?

[sunryze]

So it seems like people do still use 8.1, and I decided to go about finding rough estimates.

As of January 2020, there are 1.2 billion Windows PCs on the internet. We will use that data for our estimates.

As of today, the current marketshare of each Windows version is:

Win10: 66.64%
Win7: 18.49%
Win81: 2.57%
Win8: 0.5%
WinXP: 0.48%
WinVista: 0.07%
95, 98, ME, NT and 2000 are all at 0.00% marketshare, meaning it is probably a very small number. 

If we use our percentages with our total # of Windows PCs, we get:
Win10: 1.3 billion (as of Mar 2021), not calculated with the total becuase our latest data for that was before 10 hit 1 billion
Win7: 221.8 million
Win81: 30.8 million
Win8: 6.0 million
WinXP: 5.7 million
WinVista: 840,000
(Assuming marketshare of 0.01%) Legacy: <120,000

Meaning that around 30.8 million use 8.1, and 6 million use 8.0. This is not exact numbers, these are rough estimates.

Lets go deep into the specific Win10 versions. We have 1507, 1511, 1607, 1703, 1709, 1803, 1809, 1903, 1909, 2004, 20H2, 21H1, and Insiders to find. According to AdDuplex, per 70K computers it is:
Insider: 0.7%
21H1: N/A
20H2: 40.1% 
20H1: 40.6% 
1909: 11.1%
1903: 3.3%
1809: 1%
1803: 1.4%
1709: 1.0%
1703: <1%
1607: <1%
1511: <1%
1507: <1%

If 1.3 billion devices run 10, we get:
Insider: 9.1 million
20H2: 521 million
20H1: 527 million
1909: 144 million
1903: 42.9 million
1809: 13.0 million
1803: 18.2 million
1709: 13.0 million
>1703: <13 million
 

Why get this data? Just to see actually how many computers you are in a pool with on the internet.

[dencorso]

On 5/19/2021 at 2:21 PM, Tonny52 said:

Win7: 221.8 million
Win81: 30.8 million
Win8: 6.0 million
WinXP: 5.7 million
WinVista: 840,000

Since we're talking about rough estimates, let's write them with less digits, to reflect the depth of our lack of knowledge. Your calculations allow us to estimate that, currently there are:

Win 7: ~ 222 million machines; Win 8.1: ~ 31 million machines; Win 8.0 + XP + Vista: ~13 million machines and Legacy Win: unknowable. Or, in other words, Win 7: ~ 222 million machines and All other non-10 Win NT ~ 44 million machines, meaning a die-hard pool of about one 20% of the total number of machines running Win 10.

[Tripredacus]

The website trackers are likely wrong in the low end. There are more computers online than are capable of being tracked. Especially since we know that these sites are "trackers" and also advertising platforms, they are missing the large portion of computers running ad blockers or other types of URL filtering, not to mention custom user agents and of course, any computer that doesn't use a web browser such as appliances.

For example, does that 5.7 Million Windows XP number include XP Embedded systems? Does it include the huge amount of Bank ATMs?

[sunryze]

Probably not. We can assume maybe an extra 2 billion desktop / laptop / embedded systems exist that are not accounted for. Adding it equally, we can assume 140 million added to each OS. This is horribly inaccurate though, so we can't really know for sure.

Most ATMs, embedded machines and such run 7 or older. If we take a look at the Disney theme parks, only a few run anything 8.1 or newer, believed to be LTSB 2015. The older systems even run all the way back to Win2000 / 98, even OS/2 WARP. 

It is definitely safe to assume though that there are a lot more legacy systems out there in the world, very possibly more than 10. The Xbox 360 runs a variant of the Windows 2000 kernel (NT 5.0) sold 85 million consoles worldwide. Assuming around 10 million were thrown out or recycled to their minerals, another 10 million due to hardware failuire, around 65 million still exist today. That means that 65 million computing devices still run a Win2000-like OS.

Add another 40 million-ish for the Win10 region for the Xbox One.

Edited May 21, 2021 by Tonny52