“The decline of OS X Snow Leopard has accelerated in the last three months, perhaps because users have realized that Apple has stopped patching the 2009 operating system for the Mac,” Gregg Keizer reports for Computerworld. “From March to May, Snow Leopard lost 3.8 percentage points of its share of all Mac operating systems, according to data from metrics company Net Applications. That’s the largest three-month decline for Snow Leopard since the stretch of August-October 2012, shortly after the introduction of OS X Mountain Lion, the July 2012 upgrade that was priced 33% less than the previous year’s Lion. Net Applications estimated that 15% of all Macs that went online in May ran Snow Leopard, aka OS X 10.6.”
“Snow Leopard has become noted for its stubborn resistance to retirement,” Keizer reports. “Snow Leopard was also the last edition 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. Additionally, Snow Leopard was the last able to run on Macs equipped with 32-bit Intel processors.”
“But one relatively recent reason to dump Snow Leopard may have outweighed those factors: Apple has stopped crafting security updates for the five-year-old OS,” Keizer reports. “Another possible reason for Snow Leopard’s faster decline of late may be economical: In the last eight months Apple has cut prices of its notebooks. In October 2013, the Cupertino, Calif. firm dropped prices of its Retina MacBook Pro laptops by up to 13%. And two months ago, Apple reduced MacBook Air prices and offered a sub-$900 model to the public for the first time. The price cuts may have prompted Snow Leopard laggards to replace their aging Macs in larger numbers than previously.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Why Mac users still use OS X Snow Leopard, released in 2009 – March 6, 2014
Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard is not dead – March 5, 2014
Apple retires Snow Leopard from support, leavings 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable to attacks – February 26, 2014
Apple signals end to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard support – December 17, 2013
Mac OS X Snow Leopard stubbornly rejects retirement – February 7, 2013
Until Intuit gets around to making Quicken work on post Snow Leopard, there will always be at least one machine running it in my house.
You can “upgrade” to Quicken 2007 which does work on Mavericks. http://quicken.intuit.com/personal-finance-software/quicken-2007-osx-lion.jsp
If I needed to run Quicken, I would use my VMware Fusion virtual machine running Windows XP, and and get the latest version of Quicken for Windows.
Try SeeFinance. I like it very much.
Snow Leopard Server, which includes Rosetta, runs well under Parallels under Mavericks. You can buy SLS at the Apple Store for $19.99.
What an EXCELLENT idea! Bonus points to you. *****
I still keep a partition with SL installed on my old MacBook. It’s a fave OS X version fur shur. But I do like Mavericks 10.9.3 a lot.
Is there any way for Apple to create an “XP Mode” for Snow Leopard?
If anything it’d be a nice little gesture to the guys who can’t upgrade for a myriad of reasons… And while you’re at it Apple, bring back classic mode! DogCow all the way baby!
moof!
>Snow Leopard was also the last edition 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.
Leopard was the last PowerPC-compatible OS. Snow Leopard was the first Intel-only MacOS.
Leopard was the last to run ON a PowerPC machine but Snow Leopard was the last to run applications built FOR Power PC machines through an application called Rosetta.
Jooop: generally it is better to keep quiet if you don’t have anything intelligent to contribute. Snow leopard could only be installed on Intel machines, but offered Rosetta as an optional install. Rosetta provides for running PowerPC apps on intel machines. The original article is this accurate, and chose its words properly stating that snow leopard could run PowerPC apps, not that it could be installed on PowerPC machines.
Geez, just correct the guy and move on. How rude.
I think this so-called “desertion rate” points more to Apple successfully selling new Macs at a higher rate, especially to NEW customers who were still running old PCs with Windows XP (which Microsoft recently “abandoned”). They were exasperated at Microsoft over Windows 8 and, after “holding out” for as long as possible, decided they felt more “at home” running the latest Mac than upgrading to a PC running kludgy Windows 8.
This statistic is a percentage, not raw user numbers. So, an increase in Mavericks users would decrease the PERCENTAGE of Snow Leopard users without necessarily decreasing the actual number of Snow Leopard users.
There are 2 types of SL users:
1. Those who have mission critical software that can only run on SL or earlier builds. They are prevented from upgrading the OS due to cost or availability of the software.
2. Those who never upgrade their OS and have the same OS since they bought the machine. A lot of users only move to a new OS when they upgrade their machine.
A some point those in group 2 will disappear completely but since SL is only 5 years old there will be plenty of machines around for a few more years.
For those who are still hanging on to their old machines for full time use, I would recommend thinking about getting a new machine. The productivity increase possible due to a faster machine will outweigh any inconvenience in move to a new Mac.
I have 6 Mac minis running 10.5.8 and they run fine but limit youtube to 340 p.
My Mac minis that are Intel can do youtube at 480 and 720 p just fine.
Just saying. I ask about $130 for 2005 Mac mini and $180 for Intel Mac minis.
Just saying.
Snow Leopard is a proven, secure, distinctly modern operating system by Apple, with no known major security problems and it had a security update just over a year ago. It’s also becoming less and less of a likely target as its user share shrinks. I see no legitimate security concerns unique to Snow Leopard. For that to change, a real security issue would have to identified and remain unpatched in Snow Leopard, which I don’t think will happen anytime soon.
Mavericks had that pretty serious GoTo Fail SSL vulnerability, unpatched for some time, so if you want to be real about it, those using Mavericks from day one have had a less secure OS than those who stuck with Snow Leopard.
There’s many actual reasons to update from Snow Leopard, I’m not going to pretend security is one them.
I love Snow Leopard and I keep a boot disk with it. However, the lack of Java updates for Snow Leopard is certainly a security risk.
I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro running Mavericks, I run a pirated version of the latest Quicken because those shitheads can’t make a Mac version and I refuse to buy PC software. I have a late 2012 Mac mini running Mavericks. I have a 2011 Mac Book Air running Mavericks. I have a 2010 Mac Book Pro running Snow a Leopard that I boot up whenever I need to scan something. I have a 2005 Power Mac G5 that is my server and also runs legacy PPC apps (like Freehand) when I occasionally need them.
Additionally, Snow Leopard was the last able to run on Macs equipped with 32-bit Intel processors.
My mother uses my old white 2006 MacBook as her computer. The ONLY items she uses a computer for is to check her online mail (Hotmail) account and to pay some bills. I think I have her on Firefox for Internet browsing. That’s about all she uses the computer for – that and an occasional letter using Pages.
When her 2006 White MacBook dies is when she will upgrade to a later version of OS X.
I have SL on my 2011 iMac and upgraded to Mav on my 2009 MBP. I really like SL better and like some of the legacy software better than the newer versions which can simply be eye candy. Office X is around 13 years old and I can find the commands and don’t have the huge problems I faced with the latest version on Office (main reason I got because it was cheap through work and I had liked the Enterprise version of Outlook. Home version produced a lot of grief).
Have four seldom-used iMacs (2 flat Intel units and 2 lampshade PowerPCs) running SL or Leopard.
Our mostly-used Mac is a mini connected to our living room TV. We use FrontRow a lot and it’s great, so the mini isn’t getting an OS upgrade anytime soon. Unless someone knows a similar (and free) modern OS app that works as well (or better).
I am keeping all of my Macs up to date, running 10.9.3.
Granted, of some of the new features are useful, however of all the releases I have experienced starting with 10.2, 10.6 is still my favorite.
On my fall 2007 iMac with four gig of RAM, and the high end 2.8 processor, 10.9 causes it to freeze up routinely, I simply have to stop and wait for the spinning beach ball of death to go away. I seriously thought it was hard drive failure. Took it to a Genius Bar, their hardware tests showed everything was in order. Ithne spent a lot of time on the phone with them walking me through all the different restarts and disc cleans, and eventually erased and clean installed the entire OS, creating a new user rather than the one that dated back to OS 10.2. I still suffer the problem. If 10.10 does not clear up this I’m going to enlist Apple’s help to revert me back to 10.8.
The author left out a huge reason – just like Panther, Snow Leopard just works. Mavericks is the closest Apple has come to Snow Leopard in term of snappiness.
Mavericks is a dog compared to Snow Leopard. Mavericks takes forever to boot and shut down. Opening apps in Mavericks is slow. Even opening dialog boxes can take a long time. I am sooo tired of spinning beach balls in Mavericks. It’s BS. I love Apple but I’m sorry to say that they are really losing their touch. The user experience has gone nowhere but downhill since Snow Leopard.
But, if you want the latest and safest Java and if you don’t want to be left behind in a hundred other ways that Apple leaves you behind, you need Mavericks.
Yet another reason to not ditch Snow Leopard (YARTNDSL):
Appleworks Databases– my wife and brother still use 2006-7 era white MacBooks (which do what they need fine), and both use custom Appleworks databases I created for them well before Apple discontinued support for AW. My brother, in fact, has about 10 years of his service business client invoices in an Appleworks database he still uses daily. To my knowledge, no one has come up with any way to convert AW databases to anything else modern. You can export the data without layouts or field names, and import it into Filemaker, and set up all the layouts again, but that’s a huge, unneeded expense for my brother, a learning curve, and guess who gets to set it all up and train him for free? These older MacBooks can only be upgraded to Lion anyway, which runs a lot slower on them, and Appleworks would no longer work. I wish I could say that Apple learned a lesson by ditching long-time faithful Appleworks power-users, but this recent baloney of iWork ’08 and ’09 file formats being incompatible both with each other and with the latest iWork version, it seems clear they learned nothing. 🙁
The writer is not good at math and doesn’t know much about Macs, either. The reason many people continue to use Snow Leopard is that their Macs are not compatible with Mavericks, but are otherwise solid, capable machines. There are others that still need to run apps using Rosetta. The reason the SL fraction is getting smaller is not that the numerator is decreasing, but the denominator is growing, the total number of Macs sold continues to increase and all new ones come with Mavericks.
Snow Leopard was Apple’s best OSX ever (so far). Running 10.9x now and it’s pretty good…