“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.
I just upgraded from SL to Ml the other day to gain iCloud capabilities with the family iPads. I had no real reason to doit aside from that.
…TWO REASONS
Rosetta
Physical media
I am typing this on 10.8 Mac Pro, but we have old Macs running SL.
I do beta testing for two apps, one an HTML5 animation app, and a web development app. Both are very unhappy with the kind of hoops that Apples change for the sake of change mode. Every “upgrade” has very high development and support costs for little real benefit except that wonderful label “change”. The costs have to be passed on. You can hammer on the software developers all you want about them not being on board, but its hard to blame them.
…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
A) Rosetta
B) 10.7 Lion may well be the worst version of OS X since 10.1 Puma. Fighting with its crappy version of the Finder continues to be a chore in 10.7.5.
Now you koolaid drinkers sound like Rubio. Apple is soon to be Microsoft. So grow up your little god Apple is ready to fall.
I recently upgraded my brother’s MacBook to Lion, only find it no longer supported Apple’s analog dial up modem, his only connection to the Internet. So, I HAD to restore his Mac back to Snow Leopard.
One word ‘ClarisWorks’.
LONG LIVE PANTHER!!!!!
That takes me back. The first time Macs really impressed me, I had a class in a computer lab full of Mac Pros all running 10.3 Panther. Mac OS X blew my frickin mind. I was still using Windows XP back then. I had used some previous Macs here and there, and while they were pretty cool, these Macs running Panther outclassed every other computer I’d ever seen by miles. Every detail about the OS, big and small, just made so much sense. I bought a new iMac less than a year later after working my ass off at a summer job to save up for it.
Don’t forget all those people and companies who haven’t been able to afford to update their Macs since the GFC which happened around Leopard/Snow Leopard time. They’re still hanging on to them until they absolutely have to update
I am on Mountain Lion. After a few tweaks it seems ok.
Having said that I still prefer these features from Snow Leopard:
– Save As without having to press the option key.
– My disk as the default save location, not iCloud.
– The lack of Auto Terminate
I have fixed the default save location and auto terminate by installing Mountain Lion Tweaks. Thank You Fredrik Wiker!
As an aside:
I wish Apple would give the user the option to define the default behavior of the green zoom button.
I guess I don’t understand all the folks who say that “Save As” is a big issue for them. Are all of you really that attached to TextEdit or Preview? You are aware that MS Word, Photoshop or any 3rd party app continues to have “Save As” and that you can always pull up “Save As” by clicking the option key when you select the file menu in Apple apps? I cannot imagine doing real work in TextEdit, for instance — to devoid of features. It’s the least useful text editor out there. So many great alternatives like TextMate or BBEdit. Preview’s nice to view images and PDFs in but who saves things in Preview on a regular basis? Is it just that people just aren’t aware that there are far better apps that haven’t removed “Save As” from the default file menu? Genuinely puzzling to me….
I still love SL and also sometimes need it for work.
Having a Mac Pro that came with Lion installed, i dedicated my bay 3 drive to a SL environment for the legacy apps that don’t run at all on Lion or don’t play nice with it, that I either need occasionally and stopped being made (Adobe GoLive) or don’t use enough to justify an upgrade. I have a number of websites we built in GoLive that don’t need updating often and I hate Dreamweaver so don’t want to spend the time converting these older client sites to DW especially since when we upgrade a legacy HTML site we recommend going CMS anyway. So even DW has become a legacy app for our shop in that sense.
So when I need to update a GoLive site for a client I boot off my SL drive. Of course I could also partitioned a larger drive but hey… I gots 4 bays why not use em, right. 🙂
Interestingly Apple told me several times, that because my Mac Pro came with Lion that it wouldn’t be able to boot off an earlier OS. That turns out to be total BS. It was simply code for: We [Apple] doesn’t support earlier OS’s. Well, I haven’t had a single issue running SL on my “Lion” Mac Pro. Not a one.
I like Lion, still holding out on ML, as I’m just not feeling that the many new features are must have features, plus I don’t have the time for another learning curve. I feel like if not for the fact my computer came with Lion, I might be still be running SL full time. I would have saved a bundle on software upgrades, that’s for sure.
I’ve traditionally jumped at the new “improved” OS’s, but I’m feeling a bit tapped out. I’m just not seeing the necessity as if Apple is creating new OS’s just to keep moving, but they are not all that different – user experience wise – any more. When I’m in Word, PS, or on the web or whatever app, I’m not aware of the OS I’m in. and the rest is just playing with your box and not doing work, or using iTunes. Does my media sound or look better in the latest iTunes or Lion. Not a bit. So why upgrade?
Until Apple really changes its operating environment significantly, I’m slowing down on my OS upgrading. I doubt I’ll ever use ML. Non starter for me. I really have all the must have features I seem to need and have for awhile. Maybe I’m just in OS burn out having started with a SE in ’85.
Apple got it spot-on with Snow Leopard 10.6, absolutely spot-on. I use it still, and absolutely love it. I tried Lion, but its nowhere near as solid and fluid. SL was an OS where you could get serious work done. Nowadays, the Apple OS is just a glorified, aesthetically-pleasing way to Tweet and read Facebook whilst posing in a coffee shop, an OS for the masses, which is constantly distracted talking to iCloud and making notifications. Its not a serious work machine in my opinion. I wait for the day when the only software you can install is in the AppStore. Computing is something for everyone, not something that Apple own.
And yet some developers stopped publishing to Snow Leopard. I get sad when I see a game that is only compatible with Lion but you know what’s a slap? when they only publish it on Mountain Lion. why would you program a software the bast majority of Mac users cant use? I know it’s more effort but would it kill you to work a little more and publish it for SL, L and ML? many developers do! and apple is the worse at this. the new version of Logic Studio is only for Mountain Lion, that’s a disgrace.
I know that it’s a tactic by apple to get people to move but guess what apple, we don’t want to, we don’t need to for the most part.
Actually, it’s not a tactic by Apple at all, as Apple has no say in what systems publishers choose to support. Most likely, a developer is using an API that is only available in Mountain Lion and doesn’t have the resources (or in the case of larger publishers, doesn’t expect to make enough money to justify the resources) to make it work in previous operating systems.
It’s the same as the iOS 6-only argument, though on iOS the majority of users have updated their software within a month of its release.
SL was the ultimate OS to ever grace the Mac, L and ML are just sorry competition aimed at iphone users. Facebook integration anyone? Like no, I’m a pro user thanks anyway.