With Snow Leopard's retirement, 1 in 5 Macs are running an operating system that could be compromised because of unpatched vulnerabilities. At the end of January, 19% of all Macs were running Snow Leopard, slightly more, in fact, than ran its successor, Lion, which accounted for 16%, and almost as much as Mountain Lion, whose user share plummeted once Mavericks arrived, according to Web analytics firm Net Applications. To Apple, Snow Leopard increasingly looks like Windows XP does to Microsoft: an operating system that refuses to roll over and die. "Let's face it, Apple doesn't go out of their way to ensure users are aware when products are going end of life," said Andrew Storms, director of DevOps at security company CloudPassage, in a December interview. But Apple doesn't, leaving users to guess about when their operating systems will fall off support. None of this would be noteworthy if Apple, like Microsoft and a host of other major software vendors, clearly spelled out its support policies. The shorter span between editions meant that unless Apple extended its support lifecycle, Lion would have fallen off the list about two years after its July 2011 launch. The change was probably due to Apple's accelerated development and release schedule for OS X, which now promises annual upgrades. (In that scenario, Mavericks is now "n," Mountain Lion is "n-1" and Lion is "n-2.") Instead, Apple continued to ship security updates for Snow Leopard, and with Tuesday's patches of Mountain Lion and Lion Tuesday, it now seems plain that Apple has shifted to supporting "n-2" as well as "n" and "n-1." Under that plan, Snow Leopard was "n-2" when Mountain Lion shipped in mid-2012, and by rights should have been retired around then.īut it wasn't. Traditionally, Apple has patched only the OS X editions designated as "n" and "n-1" - where "n" is the newest - and discarded support for "n-2" either before the launch of "n" or immediately after. Apple delivered the final security update for Snow Leopard in September 2013.
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