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Apple Drops Snow Leopard Security Updates, Doesn't Tell Anyone
Freshly Exhumed writes "As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion yesterday, Snow Leopard users have not seen a security update since September, 2013. This would not be noteworthy if Apple, like a host of other major software vendors, would clearly spell out its OS support policies and warn users of such changes, but they have not. Thus, the approximately 20% of Mac users still running Snow Leopard now find themselves in a very vulnerable state without the latest security updates."
This update had one security fix. The fix for the recent SSL bug. This bug did not affect OSX Snow Leopard or earlier, therefore this update is not needed.
It's not at all a sign that Apple no longer supports Snow Leopard.
Are there Macs that can run Snow Leopard but cannot run Lion?
My 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 supports Lion, and it's one of the oldest Intel Macs. I don't think there's many people "stuck" on Snow Leopard; they should be able to upgrade to Lion and get security updates. Apple has historically only supported the current and previous versions of OS X. Basically, Lion users are getting unexpected support right now, and I think it's because of the large installed base that can't run anything newer than Lion.
Surely someone has written open source equivelents to Snow Leopard's software by now. Even if no one did, there is no logical reason for software to become EOL'd. You either fix problems for the life of the hardware, or you provide the information for your customers to fix those problems themselves. That should be law, btw.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Snow Leopard is particularly important for many users because it was the last release to support Rosetta. Anyone who still needs PowerPC apps can't upgrade.
My wife still uses Apple Works, so upgrading won't work for her.
Also, Apple has been known to push upgrades that break things without warning, so upgrading is often a last resort. For example, we were running 10.5, and iTunes asked if we wanted to update our iPad to the lastest release. After doing so, it said we had to upgrade iTunes. But we couldn't upgrade iTunes because that required 10.6. There went our ability to sync the iPad.
IIRC, the bug was introduced (fairly) recently. iOS 5 doesn't have it, either.
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There are some older Intel based Macs that will not run anything later than Snow Leopard. Also, Snow Leopard will NOT run on PowerPC based Macs. The latest OS that will run is Leopard.
Any Macs with Core Duo processors (e.g. 2006 era iMacs) can run Snow Leopard but not Lion.
Who's the other major software vendor? Microsoft? They spell out their support policies quite clearly. Everyone knew well in advance when Microsoft was ending support for XP, an OS that's been supported far, far longer than anything from Apple. My Intel iMac at home is stuck at OSX 10.6.8. It was built several months too soon and lacked some random bit of hardware related to the BIOS which disqualified it from being a proper 64-bit machine. By the time Apple announced it was dropping support for that version I hadn't seen updates in about a year anyway.
Instead of just criticizing Apple for what they do wrong, there seems to be this compulsion to make everything relative so that Apple doesn't look so bad. I'd argue that in this particular case Microsoft is a lot better than Apple. Apple seems content to sweep things under the rug as long as they can get away with it.
This is not accurate. Only Mavericks (v10.9.x) was vulnerable to the SSL issue - the security updates to Mavericks, Mountain Lion (10.8.x) and Lion (10.7.x) contained a ton of security updates in them - at least a good chunk of which would affect Snow Leopard.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...
Given that it costs you nothing to upgrade to the latest OS X now, why are people still running the old version?
Because they can't, or don't want to. I have some applications I've used for many years, that don't run without Rosetta. Since versions of the OS later than Snow Leopard have no compelling features I want, and some UI changes I actively dislike (open folder in new window, anyone?) there's no reason to update. plus, of course, the fringe machines that CAN'T be updated, but are still completely usable.
I have lots of Macs, and some are on the current OS - but I prefer to use the ones that aren't. For me, 10.6.8 is the Gold Standard.
No no. You've got it backwards. The solution is to always buy the latest Apple product and get rid of your old ones.
Bullshit. App Nap, Timer coalescing and compressed app memory would have been worth a paid upgrade on their own. Between them there is both more responsiveness, and a significantly improved battery life.
Yeah, and Windows 8 has a ton of great tech improvements under the hood too. Yet I really can't blame anyone who'd rather stick with Windows 7 and miss out on the enhancements they'll never notice to avoid the UI changes they most certainly will.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The last time Apple sold a Mac that couldn't upgrade to 10.7 was back in 2007, when they discontinued their final 32-bit Mac. Apple is not Microsoft, and if you look back at support life cycles, you'll see that they've already provided support for 10.6 longer than they typically do, even releasing security updates for 10.6-compatible software as recently as last month. It also continues to get updates to XProtect, OS X's built-in anti-malware tool.
If you're still running 10.6 for some reason, your computer is either a low-end one from at least 7 years ago, or you've made an intentional choice to remain on 10.6 for some reason (likely because it was the last release that could run Rosetta, OS X's tool for running PowerPC apps), in which case you knew what you were getting yourself into when you chose not to upgrade.
::raises hand::
That's me --- I can't move off of Mac OS X 10.6.8 until I find a replacement for Macromedia FreeHand --- I suppose at some point in time I'll just have to resort to running it in a virtual machine (there was a recent post about doing that: http://www.freehandforum.org/f... ), but for now, it's simpler to just stick w/ 10.6.8
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Yet Mavericks hasn't had any Metro like interface reboot...
Really? The slow iOS-ification of the OS doesn't count? Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there, and OS X has slowly been becoming more and more like iOS since Snow Leopard. I don't remember when they added their version of the Start Screen (Launchpad), but it's there, and you can't get rid of it. I'd say that counts.
And the Mavericks improvements I describe are most certainly noticeable. Most people use laptops these days and more than an hour extra battery life really makes a difference.
IT forced all the Macs where I work to Mavericks. (One of the most painful upgrade processes I've ever had to go through, but I'm pretty sure that was on IT. I hope it was.) There's been no battery life improvement.
I do notice that trying to open the battery menu causes some system process to crash with 100% CPU usage, so that's a new - uh, thing. Not sure it was worth the upgrade, though...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Snow Leopard is the last usable version of the Mac OS.
In the latest, you have what once was a snappy UI marred by excessive animations that you simply can't turn off if you want the faster UI.
From Safari's "flying cockroach" download icon, to the damn forced animated roll out and roll up of all disclosure triangles, Apple's addition of animations to EVERYTHING and without "a please don't animate this, I liked it when I clicked on something and the results were instant" switch, the Mac UI has gotten more and more annoying and distracting to use.
Bouncing Safari screens? Windows that pop open in your face? Email that flies off the screen? Who needs them? Not me.
Previously, you could hold control command D over text in Safari, in Mail and in TextEdit and the results would display as fast as they could in a dictionary window.
Now, the word highlights, pops open, then shrinks back, the dictionary pops open, then cascades the results down as it draws the window.
All this distracting animation, when all the user wanted was to see the definition of the word as fast as they could see it. That's why they pressed the command keys in the first place.
Apple's UI designers have lost their focus and are no longer creating user interfaces that help users without getting in their way. All too often, the interface appears to exist simply to be as busy and as distracting as it can be.
This is why I still use Snow Leopard as my primary operating system on my 5 Macs at home.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Can the open source community create a super long term support Linux distro? Most of the components of a Linux desktop have been just fine for a long time. I would be still comfortable with a KDE3 or GNOME2 desktop, for example. So stick with something that works, and concentrate on support and quality assurance for 10 years. Seeing all the bugs and unnecessary reinventing of things is very tiring and I would jump into that kind of distro in an eyeblink.
Many people wanted still to stay abroad even with crusty Windows XP (no desktop compositor, terrible security) despite the extended support ending, so there is clearly an interest for this kind of long-term conservative OS.
Good thing that they provide a tool inside the Mavericks installer to create a bootable USB stick, eh?
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/USB_stick_to_format --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction
If Terminal.app isn't your thing, there are several no-cost options with a GUI that you can download that invoke that command.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I think the issue is not how long they support an OS for, but how public they make their road map. With Microsoft users have a fairy clear and well publicized timeframe of support and lots of warning for when a particular version of Windows will no longer receive updates.
It used to be that low IQ was failing to identify the continuation of some trivial numerical sequence on some trivial test. The new low IQ is use-case blindness, the inability to even hazard a guess at the myriads of reasons other people live differently than you do. The ravening mob of blindness promulgators are ever with us. Pity.
Here's my story.
I bought my wife a second generation Core Duo iMacs, which I believe has never been upgraded from the original Leopard. I use this computer so rarely (about ten hours per years) that I can barely keep track of which leopard presently holds court.
The computer works—until some piece of software offers to "upgrade" itself, then restarts with a whole new user interface (I'm looking at you, iTunes). Then I'm constantly told the computer doesn't work any more, but the real problem is that she hasn't figured out where all the familiar functions were forcibly relocated.
I'm not willing to sit down at her desk and chase GUI tidbits from point A to point B, so I just told her "don't click upgrade". When something visibly breaks, then I'm willing to sit down and deal with it. Meanwhile I have enough sysadmin on my plate with my own Linux desktop, where I'm heavily invested in ZSH, and my FreeBSD server, where I'm making very heavy use of ZFS. This is where my neural matter wants to go.
I have a very low tolerance for having something trivial I've mastered at the autonomic level yanked back to the center of my attention. It took me close to a decade to cease seething about the relocation of the CTRL key in favour of a CAPS LOCK key that should have been ALT-NUMLOCK or, even better, CTRL-ALT-INSERT. FFS I can type ~50 wpm in ALL CAPS using the right shift key for six of my fingers, alternating to the right shift key for the other two. But guess what? The CAPS LOCK key is more prominent to my left pinkie than ENTER is to my right pinkie. If we normalize the utility of the ENTER key to 100, the utility of the CAPS LOCK key comes out around -1000.
The problem with most upgrades is that it's always more of this father-knows-best groupthink bullshit.
It's a huge project just to figure out what's going to change. The only recourse one has to all these unnecessary relearning cycles is to skip as many releases as humanly possible. I'd be thrilled if XP is the last Microsoft OS I learn how to use in this lifetime. I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 and I stayed there until 2000 went out of support. Later I ended up using XP in a different work environment and I can't name a single thing that improved, except that I had to disable a lot more bling for half a day. Long ago I held out on MSDOS until I could jump straight to Windows NT which I adopted within weeks of the Intel P6 becoming available. That was a real upgrade, one well worth reprogramming a decade of autonomic habits. I never used any of the shitshow 3.1/95/98 for more than the very occasional hour.
These upgrades change a lot of stuff for extremely dubious benefits. An upgrade is going from UFS to ZFS. That I can buy into. An upgrade is going from System 7 to OS X. On that one I can sell my wife.
What I really want concerning these fairly useless system frobs is the semantic web: searchable metadata describing every user interface action that formerly existed and whether it still exists in the new version, plus a mapping to a more-or-less equivalent version, if such a thing has even been retained. Oh yes, Apple is good at silent castration. Ideally the OS would track which user interface functions have been regularly used, and list out all the things the upgraded user will be instantly forced to relearn. But no. It's sexy. No assistance offered retraining for sexy. That what sexy means, lo
There is no "very vulnerable" state for 10.6.8 users, and the recent SSL vulnerability only affected 10.9 among Mac users. The central contention of the original post is false.