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Apple Drops Snow Leopard Security Updates, Doesn't Tell Anyone

Posted by timothy on from the they'll-figure-it-out-soon-enough dept.

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."

7 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Is anyone actually stuck on Snow Leopard? by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Snow Leapard: Rosetta by crow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Snow Leapard: Rosetta by ssam · · Score: 5, Informative

      Libreoffice supports Appleworks documents. Maybe she could migrate.

    2. Re:Snow Leapard: Rosetta by DdJ · · Score: 5, Informative

      Libreoffice supports Appleworks documents. Maybe she could migrate.

      To my surprise, so does iWork. I was able to open up a bunch of my old AppleWorks documents and spreadsheets in Pages and Numbers.

  3. It's only Apple. by MaWeiTao · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Inaccurate the Security update fixes a ton of issu by sasparillascott · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  5. Re:All right, then by neonKow · · Score: 5, Funny

    No no. You've got it backwards. The solution is to always buy the latest Apple product and get rid of your old ones.