The online donation–management company Qgiv has analyzed the charitable-giving patterns of 165,000 people and found that Mac users are far more benevolent than Windows users.

Qgiv analyzed 320,000 donations given through their donation platform from November 2011 through November 2012, and discovered that the average donation given by a Mac user to a nonprofit organization was $182; the average Windows user's donation was a mere $137.

At $165 per contribution, donations that came in through private or corporate domain names were more generous than those from free email services. The average donation from a Gmail user was $143; AOL users were close beind at $138. Hotmail folks averaged $128 per gift, and Yahoo! users brought up the rear at $120 per.

Among the browsers used to submit contributions to nonprofits, Apple's Safari was the preferred browser for the most generous donors, with an average donation of $168. It can be inferred that users of Safari for Windows – both of them? – brought that figure down from the Mac users' mean gift of $182.

Chrome users, by the way, coughed up an average of $153 per donation, while Firefox users chipped in an average of $140. By now, you might easily guess which browser was used for the smallest average gift – and you'd be right: users of Internet Explorer pitched in a piddling $138 per contribution.

One might argue that Mac users, being inured to paying a premium for their kit, might be less averse to forking over generous amounts of cash, whether for computers or charities.

But an alternative argument could be made, as well: after paying $2,799 for their 15-inch, 2.6GHz MacBook Pro with a Retina display, a Mac user would have less money available for eleemosynary benevolence.

It appears that Mac users are merely more unselfish with their disposable income than are their Windows-using counterparts. ®