“Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard, which shipped in August 2009, continued to resist retirement last month, new data showed,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld.
“January statistics from Web analytics vendor Net Applications pegged Snow Leopard’s share of all Macs at 28.2 percent, half a point higher than the 27.7 percent recorded by OS X Lion,” Keizer reports. “It was the fourth month in a row that Snow Leopard has been in second place, behind the newest edition, OS X Mountain Lion, but ahead of 2011’s Lion… Mountain Lion, which Apple shipped in July 2012, again gained ground last month at the expense of its predecessors, ending January in the No. 1 position with 34.5 percent of all Macs.”
Keizer reports, “Many have declared that they would not abandon Snow Leopard because it was the last that let users run applications compiled for the PowerPC processor.”
Read more in the full article here.
snow leopard best os x ever
It would help if Apple hadn’t broken so much stuff in Lion (Safari, Screen Sharing, Rosetta, etc).
Safari and Screen Sharing work perfectly for me in Mountain Lion and I don’t recall any difference in how they behaved on Lion. Also, keep in mind that the latest version of Safari is also available for Snow Leopard, and works exactly the same there as it does in Lion and Mountain Lion. I would love to hear what issues you’re having, though, as it might be possible to easily remedy the situation. Plus, it’s entirely possible that whatever changed for you in Lion was simply a matter of changing the perspective in which you used a certain feature, rather than its removal/redesign entirely.
Rosetta was Removed. All the programs that required it, do not function.
Indeed, and that is a frustrating feature removal for those that depend on it. But I didn’t comment on Rosetta, because I already knew that it didn’t work and there is no reliable solution short of refusing to upgrade.
I was specifically asking what had broken in Safari and Screen Sharing. I’m most curious about Safari, as Safari 5 was available for Lion for quite some time. If Safari 6 broke something, I’d be interested to hear what it is. I started using Chrome for some time because I grew tired of how resource-hungry Safari 5 was. However, Safari 6 uses far fewer resources than any other web browser on the Mac according to several studies (except in a few categories, such as memory reclamation, though that is easily remedied by quitting and reopening Safari).
Screen Sharing in Lion, to my knowledge, is identical to Screen Sharing in Snow Leopard, so I would like to know what changed/was broken.
Screen Sharing is different. With both, you have to enter your name and password, and with Lion to Lion, it asks the sharer to allow the sharing. SL to Lion, you can just connect. But worse, I find that with SL to Lion, if the SL end happens to go to sleep, on waking the Lion end will often kernel panic 🙁 Then I have to endure Lion going through OMG checking, and a couple of times I then couldn’t log back in without running permissions repairs.
I had never experienced the Screen Sharing issue in Lion, as all of my computers use the same login. I can see why that would be frustrating. If you’re up for a slight change in your workflow, here’s a great way to work around that:
http://yjsoon.com/2012/01/screen-sharing-on-os-x-lion-without-asking
As for the KP’s, there is likely some other issue with your computer, either software or hardware. I would strongly recommend a complete backup followed by an erase & install of your OS to determine if it resolves the issue. If it does not, then there may be a hardware fault. Your panic.log file might give an indication what is causing the KP, though if you’re not familiar with them, I would suggest sharing them with someone that is.
Safari broke when it dropped support for RSS. For me, it’s hardly usable now. Very bad decision.
“I didn’t comment on Rosetta, because I already knew that it didn’t work and there is no reliable solution short of refusing to upgrade.” thethirdshoe’s point made–and yet you still “yeah, but stilled”
Actually, that’s not a “yeah, but still” argument. “Yeah, but still” would have been if I said that Rosetta not working is a valid argument, but here’s 3 reasons why you shouldn’t be using Rosetta anyway.
Instead, I pointed out that his concerns about Rosetta are valid, but that in my experience, Sucker’s concerns about Screen Sharing and Safari were non-issues, unless he was having problems with them that I wasn’t (which, FuzzyBo seems to be having, and to which I have already responded).
If you’re going to challenge someone for making a fallacious argument, be certain that you understand when an argument is fallacious and when it is not.
Rosetta was never going to be a long term solution, it was there to give developers time to update their code.
The real question is why do you continue to support software that isn’t being updated by the developer? Surely you could have upgraded or replaced it with other software by now?
What is this mysterious software that is frozen in time anyway?
For one thing, the program that allows you to translate older versions of documents into ones that are readable by newer versions of document-based software. MacLinkPlus was never updated into an Intel version.
Interesting, I haven’t needed that since the classic days, and I have yet to come across anyone else who still has such a need until you mentioned it.
What kind of files are you using this with in 2013?
For me, a copy of Adobe CS 1 I won long ago. I just play with it to learn about it, so I can’t justify replacing it. Appleworks, unless I missed the part where there is a decent drawing program that can replace it and open all of the files I have in that format. And games. I have lots of PPC only games that I still enjoy playing. They either have not been replaced, or the new versions (games are rarely updated in a situation like this, they just get primarily bug fixes) are just something I do not find entertaining, or in some cases, the newer games just plain suck. So I stick with SL, along with most of my Mac using friends (unless they’ve bought a new Mac, in which case there has been a few questions about going back to SL…)
Here’s an app that can open your AppleWorks drawings and convert them to a format that is still supported today:
http://www.eazydraw.com/RetroSupport.htm
The latest version of the app no longer imports AppleWorks, but a license for the latest version also works as a license for the Retro version, which I’ve linked, and which will work.
Just to clarify, that won’t necessarily help you get off Snow Leopard entirely, but it will at least ensure that you won’t have a bunch of documents trapped on an aging and eventually obsolete system.
Not to mention custom programs that people have built their business on. Low and behold, some people try to avoid allocating developer resources to update a perfectly working app. It is usually the combination of new features and dropped support that prevents one from upgrading.
It is possible, though, to run Tiger and Leopard under VirtualBox and get the job done, but you need a well-equipped recent Mac to get decent performance.
We use Mountain Lion on all of our workstations but all of our servers continue to run Snow Leopard. The move to Lion Server and the follow up Mountain Lion Server is just too big a step backwards to even consider. While Snow Leopard Server isn’t the wondrous thing that many of us had hoped, the replacements are toys designed for small workgroups at best.
Apple should take a hint.
+1 Gets my vote for most logical interface.
Indeed!
Even if you have the latest hardware, Snow Leopard is the most solid, most efficient, best interface Apple OS. Lion and Mtn Lion are downgrades. Cook & Co need to get a clue!
You are absolutely right. When I bought my i7-equipped, 27-inch iMac, it came with 10.5. But I just love Snow Leopard because it can run my old OS X / PowerPC apps using Rosetta. Furthermore, using Sheepshaver, I run my entire original OS 7.5.5 Mac and all its apps and all my ancient documents, including WriteNow docs. And I have Bootcamp installed so I can run special medical software using XP Pro.
My Mac is like an F-22 fighter at work; all the other schmooks running Windblows on their F-4 Phantoms can’t do a fraction of the work that I can do.
Never used Sheepshaver, but with Mini vMac I emulate a Mac running System 7.5 just fine under Mountain Lion, for what it’s worth.
That’s real good to know. I’ll check into vMac. How easy was it to install? I had installed Sheepshaver several months before the truly good version was consolidated onto the current, dominant website and the installation was a confusing pain because key steps did not worked as advertised.
Well, with new iMacs still not shipping in volume and the Mac Pro not having been refreshed there hasn’t been as much Mountain Lion being forced into the market place, either.
Still use SL for some old games and progs
I have duel-boot Mac Pros so I can swith between Lion and Snow Leopard and run powerpc software, but I can see how this would be a problem with storage for laptops.
I wish Apple would upgrade Rosetta to 64-bit so we could have the option of installing in Lion.
This solution only works on pre Lion installed Macs.
It is a good solution though.
Quicken.
That’s on Intuit, not Apple. Their refusal to keep up with the latest technology will be their undoing. I moved on from Quicken entirely years ago, as did many others. And, with the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, the need for Quicken for many people has been supplanted by apps that people carry with them everywhere.
Although, to be fair, QuickBooks alternatives are less readily available, which could be another good reason why Snow Leopard hangs on so tightly.
Umm they updated Quicken for Lion like a year ago.
The Quicken for Lion is still Quicken 2007, literally years out of date – or you can get Quicken Essentials which is mostly just a checkbook program. We switched to MoneyDance last year to support a company that actually updates their Mac products.
I need QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions for Mac. I could retire 5 Windows installations, if Intuit would bring this out.
Yo!
And I don’t think I can upgrade my gen 1 intel iMac to Lion either. I would but I can’t so it will stay with Snow Leopard forever.
Yep, have a 2007 Mac Pro that has to have upgraded graphics card to get beyond SL. So far, have no reason to do so, especially with a new Mac Pro coming soon.
Many people still have Intel Macs that don’t let them past Snow Leopard. I have an early iMac Core 2 Duo, and my friend has a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, neither of which can be upgraded.
This is the only comment to recgnize the problem –Two year oldw hardware that Apple has PREVENTED from upgrading past Snow Leopard!
+1
We may not be a fan of Microsoft, but they do one thing right and that is providing support for backwards compatibility and never limiting software do to a computer’s age
What? My 2007 MacBook Pro can be upgraded to ML it’s 6 years old now.
Ok, but is it all to do all the features: like airdrop, air mirroring, power nap? Apple says the hardware can’t support those features, yet third party developers have no problem.
*able to do all
We’re getting a little off topic here, as the discussion is about Lion compatibility, not feature lists. But, as Apple states in their support article, AirPlay Mirroring is only supported on Macs that have 2nd and 3rd gen Intel Core processors that have special hardware video encoding tech:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5404?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
As for AirDrop, it is again a hardware-based feature. Certain AirPort cards support technology that others don’t. You can still activate AirDrop using a terminal command ( defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1 ), but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it will either be unreliable or not secure.
Power Nap can’t be mimicked by any third-parties yet, due to the fact that computers that don’t support it are simply asleep when they’re asleep, not Power Napping.
Just because a product CAN support a specific feature, doesn’t mean it should. Apple released iOS 4 for the iPhone 3G and it was awful. Even with the missing features, it was still slow and buggy. Since then, they’ve taken pains to make sure that no feature is released for a product where it may not perform up to snuff (except, arguably, Siri—the best explanation of its absence on iOS 4 was to prevent overload of the service, not because the device couldn’t handle it).
I would like to see what developers have made Air Drop and AirPlay Mirroring available for unsupported Macs and to see how well they work. I’ve not seen any alternatives, but would be interested to recommend them to others if they are indeed as useful as you claim.
Any Core 2 Duo equipped Mac can move past Snow Leopard, including the above mentioned machines. It’s possible that the machines won’t take Mountain Lion, but Lion is supported on each and every mac sold after August 2007, and many from before then.
Why? The two major differences in the new OS’s are just checkboxes that can be disabled.isit because people are afraid of a digital upgrade instead of having the physical upgrade disk?
Why? Rosetta and support for PPC software, that’s why.
Some of us need to use specialized software that has not, and will not, be updated to to Intel. Some of it is the company went out of business, some of it was written by academic organizations that have moved on to other projects.
As someone above noted, maintaining backwards compatibility is the one thing MS does right.
Agree. Snow Leopard is the best OS. Apple should learn to simplify an OS, not over bloat or complicate it like Lion.
I’m keeping 2 Snow Leopard laptops (Air + Pro) because I need them in an environment that has software that only supported/works on Snow Leopard.
My primary desktop is up to date on Mountain Lion.
My MacBook Pro still on SL. Can’t let go of GoLive yet.
GoLive 9 works in Mtn Lion
Snow Leopard for the WIN !!!
For those of you who care, here is a link on how to get Java 7 working on SL, its pretty simply:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13536667/how-to-install-java-jdk-7-on-snow-leopard
Well, Apple really trashed server when they went to leopard. The last really usable server is SL. The newer DNS, DHCP, web server, and wiki, are particularly useless. But the whole package is a steaming POS.
What am I supposed to do, throw out perfectly good Macs just to run the latest OS? No.
Have SL on the first Intel Macbook (Core Duo), which is the max that it can run. Also have a Mac Mini with Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion is much better.
Some people still need Rosetta.
I just run Snow Leopard in a virtual machine for the rare times I need to run it.
Which virtual machine software will run Snow Leopard?
I regret having upgraded to Lion/Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard was and still is the best iteration of Mac OS X!
The biggest advantage to Snow Leopard in an actual work prod unction environment is that the work procedures in terms of knowing where and when your files are actually saved and stored are far more transparent.
So glad they put Save As back because due to the complexity of my projects, some web projects with several hundred files, I have to know exactly when and where my files are saved, having the OS decide where they are saved is a non-starter.
Thats the problem with Lion and Mountain Lion. I use Mountain Lion because so much of my software requires it.
I never understood the fascination for Snow Leopard. If you don’t need Rosetta and your processor supports Lion / Mountain Lion there is simply no reason to resist the progress. Once you get used to ML there is no way back. SL then looks like bubble gum from the 80ies. If you don’t like Launchpad and Notification (like me), just don’t use it (like me). But there are so many other helpful things like natural scrolling. That alone would be worth the upgrade. Once it is understood, there is no way back at all. Give ML a try, it’s worth it. (Yes, I am a pro user! I make my living from working on a Mac every day!)
@ I love Apple:
Why would I pay money for “natural scrolling”?
There is no technical reason to upgrade from OS 10.6.
Apple will have no choice but to support 10.6 for years to come since PowerPC processors are still in wide use by many folks.
Actually, they will have a choice. They’ve already made it, in fact. If Apple had “no choice”, then Safari 6 would have been made available for 10.6. iCloud support is missing from 10.6 and isn’t coming. Messages only works on Mountain Lion. Apple doesn’t look to the past. They’ve moved on. If you can’t do the same, then you’ll be left behind. There are plenty of growth opportunities left for Apple.
So Safari 6 is better? In what way?
Sure, Apple can attempt to force it planned obsolescence on its customers, but to be frank, OS 10.7 and 10.8 don’t offer any additional value for the productivity user. If Apple wants its customers to upgrade between hardware refreshes, customers need a reason. The ONLY reason Mtn Lion has more customers than Snow Leopard is because new Mac buyers don’t want to reload the OS. They simply turn off all the crap features and live with what they have.
For enterprise, the first thing to do is disable Notifications and other time wasters. iCloud is never used because critical file sharing in many/most businesses cannot be trusted to unaccountable 3rd parties, especially ones that don’t support cross-platform access. ML FAIL.
Safari 6 uses a fraction of the system resources that Safari 5 did. In fact, Safari 6 uses less memory than both Chrome and Firefox. I switched to Chrome quite some time ago because it made my system run so much smoother, but when Safari 6 was released, I gave it a shot and soon discovered that it was taking up much less RAM than Chrome had. When I looked for a comparison between browsers, I found a shootout online that indicated that Safari used significantly less memory than all the other browsers:
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/10/browser-speed-tests-mac-edition-chrome-22-firefox-15-safari-6-opera-12-02/
I’m not sure if they included Safari Web Content in their memory usage total, so they could have made a mistake, but even with 26 tabs in 5 windows open, Safari is only using a total of 1GB of RAM on my machine right now.
Also, new Mac buyers can’t reload the OS. If your Mac ships with Mountain Lion on it, it will not accept any earlier OS on it.
They will have to pry my Snow Leopard from my cold dead hands.
Apple’s OX 10.5 is equivalent to MS’ Windows XP then.
natural scrolling whatever, that does not matter to me one way or the other.
Launchpad is silly, Notifications are great, but my big issue is the one of where and when files are stored. My applications require project folders and Mountain Lion tries to “enforce its will” on that.
That is not an option for me, so I have had to enforce my will based upon my needs, and Save As is the most practical way to do it. I open a finder window that shows exactly where and when each file is saved. Sorry, there is no other practical way.
Save As still exists in Mountain Lion. Simply hold the Option key or press Command-Option-Shift-S to Save As. Once you’ve adjusted to the new workflow, you’ll be right back where you were before.
uhhh yeah, I know about it. If you read my post you would know that I use it.
I apologize. Your intent was unclear. From the way you wrote your comment, it seemed to say that you were not upgrading to Mountain Lion because of the lack of Save As functionality.
Yeah, I really didnt write it that correctly. At the moment I wrote it a colleague was complimenting me on how well I typed and talk to him at the same time. Yeah right!
That’s alright. It’s all sorted. Just don’t let him know that you’re not as skilled a type-talker as he believes. Let him keep the illusion. 😀
continuing: I have FAR too many files from different apps in these project folders. To think that I could possibly rely on versioning to track and recover them is beyond silly.
I use Mountain Lion at home and Snow Leopard at work. I’ll update my work computer eventually, but I’ll likely wait for another point release or two. Things just work so well in Snow Leopard that it’s hard to justify taking the time to upgrade the OS. My only reason right now considering the upgrade is for smooth iCloud syncing between my home & work computers.
i’m still using SL, because my early 2006 imac cant be upgraded
I bet quite a few of them that aren’t upgraded are schools. Why? Rosetta. Most publishers haven’t gotten off their butts yet to either make new or update their programs for Intel. Makes me worried when we need new machines soon. The boss is thinking of switching to PC since they are cheaper (haha) and we need new software anyway.
Actually, I work at a rather large school district and we have about 7,000 MacBook Airs that are capable of running Snow Leopard but aren’t, despite the fact that several pieces of our software are not compatible. We have asked for those that depend on said software to find alternatives. We have a similar issue with Java, as it is no longer installed by default and the latest Apple-supported version disables the web plug-in, so teachers that use Java-only tools are also being asked to find alternatives. The education market handles this situation in one of two ways: they sit on their old technology and refuse to change as it becomes obsolete (a disservice to their students), or it adapts to using the new technology even if it requires some additional spending for updated software and new lesson plans.
Plus, any computer purchased today won’t be able to run Snow Leopard, so businesses and schools won’t have a choice much longer, unless they intend to throw good money after bad attempting to fix obsolete hardware to maintain compatibility with obsolete software.
Apple seems to be the victim of its own making by creating machines that last way longer than they are useful. I have an 13 year old iMac G3 that works just fine along with a powermac G5.
way longer than they are useful
WTF? I still have, and use, my 1993 Quadra 650 souped up with a PPC 601 CPU, AND my 1997 PPC 9600 souped up with a 900 MHz G3 CPU, AND my PowerBook Wall Street souped up with a 500 MHz G4 CPU. They’re not leaving my house.
One of the reasons Apple KILLS on ROI (Return On Investment) is that their machines are useful LONGER than any competition. That’s a GREAT thing!
What people complain about is that Apple refuses to sit and rot with old technology. Apple is the cutting edge.