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Snow Leopard being retired


Guest LilBambi

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Guest LilBambi

Snow Leopard is being retired. The interesting thing is that there have been no security updates for Snow Leopard since I think September 2013 from my reading.

 

From the image in this article,

 

Apple provided Snow Leopard security updates for slightly more than four years, just four months shy of the record set by Tiger (OS X 10.4), which received its final fixes in September 2009.

 

Here's more:

 

 

As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, or OS X 10.9, as well as for its two predecessors, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Lion (10.7), Apple had nothing for Snow Leopard or its owners yesterday.

 

Snow Leopard was also ignored in December, when Apple patched Safari 6 and 7 for newer editions of OS X, butdid not update Safari 5.1.10, the most-current Apple browser for the OS.

 

Apple delivered the final security update for Snow Leopard in September 2013.

 

 

Although Mac users don't garner nearly as many users as Windows does, 1 in 5 Mac users being left in the dust by Apple is nothing to sneeze at as noted in the Mac Virus blog by David Harley Senior Research Fellow at ESET working with the Cyber Threat Analysis Center since 2011:

 

Snow Leopard waves goodbye to support? - Mac Virus blog

 

Gregg Keizer for Computer World: Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leaves 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable to attacks. Well, Apple has never had Microsoft’s patience with the upgrading of obsolescent operating systems, even though upgrades are often highly dependent on hardware suitability.
  • Windows XP: released 2001, support ending in April 2014.
  • Snow Leopard: released 2009…

Just saying. Some would argue that maintaining XP for so long has meant that people haven’t been upgrading to more secure systems.

 

David Harley

Small Blue-Green World

 

 

He can also be found @DavidHarleyBlog on Twitter.

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Weren't the system requirements for Lion the same as Snow Leopard? I am sure a few older model were left behind.

 

From what I understand, Rosetta was removed in Lion and beyond. Any applications that would need Rosetta would be almost 14 years old!

 

Wow.

 

Adam

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Apple is not providing security updates for this OS? Where is the outrage?

rhetorical question really, all though usage could be as high 20% of Apple desktop OS users, the amount of people is a rounding error in XP users.

But this should throw cold water on generic claims that Apple desktop OS is more secure than other OS's.

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Guest LilBambi

Snow Leopard is the last to provide Rosetta compatibility if I remember correctly.

 

The difference between the Desktop Apple users and Windows users isn't really even in the same ballpark.

 

PZKsgv2.jpg

 

As I noted in my comment on the Mac Virus blog (which hasn't been approved as yet), Macs hold only a 7.66% of Desktop users worldwide compared with Windows which holds 90.74% of Desktop users.

 

Even so, 7.66% of all Desktop users worldwide is still a fair amount of users and 1 out of 5 of those will still be a very large segment of the Mac population.

Edited by LilBambi
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Apple is not providing security updates for this OS? Where is the outrage?

 

The equivalent OS to Snow Leopard is probably Vista, when it comes down to time frame. I have an older Mac that runs Tiger. There are quite a few folks that are running OS9, though some have finally moved on from that.

 

Snow Leopard is still popular, but just like XP.... it is time to move on. This OS is four generations ago. I think many systems running Snow Leopard could be moved to at least Lion.

 

Fact of the matter is there are fewer security issues with OSX than Windows. We have patches occasionally, but not nearly as often as with WIndows. Is that because of the smaller userbase? Probably not, but the core of OSX is unix-like, and it inherits many of the security benefits of the design.

 

Adam

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