In December, Storms bet that Lion and Mountain Lion had been retired when Apple did not issue security updates for those two editions, even as it fixed a handful of flaws in Mavericks. Yesterday's security updates patched 21 vulnerabilities in Lion, 26 in Mountain Lion.
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The one comfort in Tuesday's updates was that it looked like Apple will continue to support Lion and Mountain Lion a while longer, even though it has offered those users a free upgrade to Mavericks.
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Snow Leopard, while requiring a Mac with an Intel processor, was the latest edition able to run the Rosetta translation utility, and thus launch PowerPC software.Īdditionally, Snow Leopard was the final version able to run on Macs equipped with 32-bit Intel processors, making it impossible for owners of some older machines to upgrade beyond OS X 10.6. Snow Leopard users have given many reasons for hanging on, including some identical to those expressed by Windows XP customers: The OS still works fine for them their Macs, while old, show no sign of quitting and they dislike the path that Apple's taken with OS X's user interface (UI).Īlso in play is the fact that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X able to run applications designed for the PowerPC processor, the Apple/IBM/Motorola-crafted CPU used by Apple before it switched to Intel in 2006.
With Snow Leopard's retirement, 1 in 5 Macs are running an operating system that could be compromised because of unpatched vulnerabilities. At the end of January, 19% of all Macs were running Snow Leopard, slightly more, in fact, than ran its successor, Lion, which accounted for 16%, and almost as much as Mountain Lion, whose user share plummeted once Mavericks arrived, according to Web analytics firm Net Applications. To Apple, Snow Leopard increasingly looks like Windows XP does to Microsoft: an operating system that refuses to roll over and die. "Let's face it, Apple doesn't go out of their way to ensure users are aware when products are going end of life," said Andrew Storms, director of DevOps at security company CloudPassage, in a December interview.
But Apple doesn't, leaving users to guess about when their operating systems will fall off support.
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None of this would be noteworthy if Apple, like Microsoft and a host of other major software vendors, clearly spelled out its support policies. The shorter span between editions meant that unless Apple extended its support lifecycle, Lion would have fallen off the list about two years after its July 2011 launch. The change was probably due to Apple's accelerated development and release schedule for OS X, which now promises annual upgrades.
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