Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
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Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#2> Apple on Tuesday made it clear that it will no longer patch OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when it again declined to offer a security update for the four-and-a-half-year-old operating system.
Well, The SSL bug only affected Mavericks. Additionally, I don't think we know if the security updates released for mountain lion and lion also affected Snow Leopard. And if it did, well, Apple moves quicker than Microsoft does anyway with new OS release every year.
If there are still people running Snow Leopard, either they have an old computer that is more than 5 years old, or they specifically don't want to upgrade to Lion. For the former, Apple knows most people will have upgraded their old computers by now, or will soon in the future. For the latter group, most know what they're doing by not upgrading.
Snow Leopard is 4 years old. And the last update for it was September 2013, just 5 months ago. It clearly was Apple's XP, if you will, and the longest supported out of all releases, I think.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#3> Apple on Tuesday made it clear that it will no longer patch OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when it again declined to offer a security update for the four-and-a-half-year-old operating system. Well, The SSL bug only affected Mavericks. Additionally, I don't think we know if the security updates released for mountain lion and lion also affected Snow Leopard. And if it did, well, Apple moves quicker than Microsoft does…
My $2700 Cintiq is 7 years old and works dandy, but Wacom will not be making Maverick drivers -- ever. So I won't be upgrading ever. My TV is 10 years old and working. We have a 15 year old TV in the office. My 2001 ibook is going strong and my six year could use it -- but it can't even be updated to the new wireless networking protocols, and linux abandoned the G3.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#4While I don't have any macs still running Snow Leopard, it has a special place in my heart because it can still install Warcraft 3 as well as play many older Mac games pre-Intel.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#5Snow Leopard is the most recent version of OSX able to run on 32 bit Intel machines, like the one I have here. Sure, it's 8 years old but it's still running well and I'm in no hurry to throw it out.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#6The thing about Snow Leopard is that it's the terminal release for 32bit intel machines. Like the one I'm typing on right now, the first white intel macbook. (Though, I recently switched it to Ubuntu 13.10 after a hard drive crash. It might go back. )
For a lot of things, It's still good enough. Chrome works. Mail works. ITunes. And for my purposes, terminal and ssh too.
Similarly, I've still got an old PPC mini running Leopard (also it's terminal release) as an iTunes server. It's no speed daemon, but it's not like serving a couple mp3 streams is that hard. But it hasn't gotten updates in a while, so I've got to look at moving on with that one.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#7It does seem strange that Apple, which does a great job regarding fragmentation on the mobile platform, has such difficulties with the issue on desktop platforms.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#8It does seem strange that Apple, which does a great job regarding fragmentation on the mobile platform, has such difficulties with the issue on desktop platforms.
That will be less of an issue going forward with free OS updates. Then it will just be people who don't want to upgrade for whatever reason that stay behind.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#9To put that in perspective, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard were released to manufacturing at about the same time, and that ~4 years is roughly 25% of the time that Microsoft supported Windows XP.
I'm biased, but that kind of organization-wide upgrade treadmill would be a nonstarter with most of my clients (ranging from small-business to enterprise). Strange move by Apple if they hope to challenge Microsoft's lion share of PCs in business.
Re: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable
#10Snow Leopard was the high watermark release for OS X, before focus and engineering talent migrated to iOS, and successive releases of OS X began to become cluttered with throwaway useless user interface candy and naggy GateKeeper dialogs.