“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.”
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