One of the most popular and the oldest Apple Mac OS, Snow Leopard has reached its end point, as the company abruptly stops issuing the latest security updates.
Snow Leopards are considered endangered species and various measures are in place to help propagate the existence of these wild creatures. In the digital world, Snow Leopard, which is the name of one of Apple's most popular and currently the oldest OS X version, has reached its end-of-life support after less than half a decade of service. Traditionally, the Cuppertino tech giant works differently than Microsoft, which issues several warnings before ending support for any Windows OS version. Apple simply stops issuing security updates to its OS X versions, when it decides to stop supporting it any further.
In this case, Snow Leopard or Mac OS X 10.6, which was launched across the world in August 2009, missed Apple's most recent update that fixes major security vulnerability, implying the seventh major release of Mac OS X has reached its demise, reports IBTimes. Snow Leopard remains a popular desktop operating system among Mac OS X users despite a free upgrade, as it still runs on 19 percent of Mac computers, according to data tracking firm Net Applications. Comparatively, the succeeding OS X 10.7 Lion powers only 16 percent of Mac computers.
As disappointing as it may be for Snow Leopard fans, they can still use the older OS X version even without Apple's support. But that leaves all users vulnerable to frequent web attacks, bugs and security flaws. On a brighter side, Snow Leopard users can upgrade to the latest Apple OS X Mavericks in a simple way, at no cost. Lack of a similar option in Windows has led to several concerns among XP users and criticized Microsoft for entertaining such a move.
Snow Leopard is favored by several dedicated Mac users mainly for its ability to run apps designed for the PowerPC processor, the CPU used by Apple before it switched to Intel processors in 2006. This is also the last OS X version able to run on Macs suing 32-bit Intel processors, which is also one of the top reasons why owners of old machines stuck with Snow Leopard.
Apple also excluded the Safari 5.1.10, latest browser version supported by Snow Leopard, whereas the tech giant updated Safari 6 and 7 in December.
