Snow Leopard has been a wonderful operating system for Macs, but over four years into its life span Apple is posed to send it to the retirement home. The writing was on the wall for Snow Leopard in December 2013 when Apple patched Safari for OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and Mavericks without thinking about their older sibling. Snow Leopard had received a security update in September of 2013, just two months earlier.
This past week the company released a new OS X update that fixed SSL/TLS security holes, which allowed attackers with privileged access to your network to capture or modify data in protected sessions. Software gets retired sometimes, that in and of itself isn't news. However there's a detail pointed out by the folks at ComputerWorld.com that makes this revelation sort of troubling.
According to ComputerWorld.com, 19% of Mac users are still sticking with Snow Leopard, leaving roughly 1 in 5 Macs vulnerable to these holes in security. Snow Leopard is still popular for a number of reasons. It's the last version of OS X that supported to support the PowerPC processor that preceded the switch to Intel. If you've got an older computer that's just used for day-to-day Internet and word processing, there's really no reason to stop using Snow Leopard until your computer dies.
The problem is Apple hasn't officially announced its intention to send Snow Leopard to a nice farm with a new family. Users who don't keep up to date with Apple news, or just rely on the updates their system suggests, may be left out in the cold with security loopholes on their machines they don't know about.
If you're a Snow Leopard user who is worried about your security there is good and bad news. The bad news is the security upgrade fixes a loophole in Apple's security library so stay away from apps like Safari, the official Twitter for Mac app, iMessage, FaceTime, and the Mail email client. Thankfully you still have options. For web browsing switch to Chrome or Firefox. If you have access to a third party email such as Thunderbird or Outlook those should be secure alternatives to Mail.
As for Lion or Mountain Lion fans worried their OS may be the next on the chopping block, rest easily. Apple is still offering users of those systems a free upgrade to Mavericks.
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