Official: Linux buffs lay out more on marital aids than Mac users

Mac owners spend more money on sex toys than Windows users do, but Linux buffs outspend both of them, even though they visit less pages on pervy product producers' websites.

That's the claim of one such, UK dildo deployer Lovehoney, which has published its Google Analystics logs in a shamelessly self-promotional plug.

Or should that be butt-plug?

Despite the anomalous activity of - probably sole - HPUX user grabbing an eyeful of 18 pages per visit, by far the majority of the site's visitors - 98.8 per cent of the visits in a given month - do so on Windows PCs. Mac users come second - clearly they're thoughtful lovers - scoring five per cent. Linux lads are next, accounting for 0.7 per cent of site visits.

So much you could estimate from the operating system market shares, but their pages-per-visit scores show they're all similarly keen on marital aids: 9.61 pages per visit for Windows, 8.36 for Mac and 7.76 for Linux.

I mentioned HPUX, but Sun OS, FreeBSD and a generic 'Unix' all form tiny percentages of the site's visitors but peek at a substantial number of pages when they do. There's rarely a dull moment in the UK's server farms, but when there is, those big-iron monkeys have plenty of time to ponder the purchase of a Thai Bead or two.

We all know what a lot of these boys get up to after flicking through Lovehoney's virtual pages - here, if you want to make your own mark on the stats - but which ones take the most time? Step forward, for starters, owners of Symbian smartphones, who spend an average of seven minutes 50 seconds on the site. I'll discount the HPUX user who left his browser open for 58 minutes 13 seconds while called to other... ahem... business. Poor lad probably had to go and debug a sub-routine and got a little tied up.

There's an unknown-OS operative who took ten minutes 37 seconds, but that's probably an anomaly, like the HPUX entry. Which brings us back to the supreme source of devices designed to be used one-handed: Symbian.

Mac users spent an average of five minutes 56 seconds on the site, just ahead of Linux users' five minutes 16 seconds and Windows folks' five minutes 14 seconds.

One of the quickest was the FreeBSD crowd, who clicked and were done in one minute 52 seconds.

But how do these figures translate into sales of sexually stimulating stuff? Let's look, if we may, at average spend.

Hello, Linux boys. You lot spend, on average, £48.55 on dildos, lube and edible undies. Of the named operating systems, the Mac brigade comes next with £40.38, followed by Windows users, who spend on average £35.90.

Interestingly, iPhone owners form a category of their own, but having coughed up so much for their shiny handsets and carrier tariffs, they can only manage to spend an average of £34.59 on Lovehoney's offerings. PSP owners contribute £32.93, Wii fans £32.25 and iPod Toucher-uppers £31.76.

The Symbian fellows dish out £30.96 on dildos, PS3ers £26.44 and - yes, there he is - our solitary HPUX friend coughed up £16.44.

Xbox 360 owners don't appear in Lovehoney's list, so either they're all a very chaste crowd or they have other outlets for their passion...