[Macworld]

Post your comments for OS X Snow Leopard shows signs of becoming Apple's XP here

[DarkSith]

I have to agree with the reader comment from Computerworld, even though I do have ML installed on my iMac. But I also have SL and Win 7 installed too on separate partitions. Lion to me was crap, but ML is much better. I like the feel of SL though; it still feels like a computer OS and not a mixture of OS X and iOS.

[Hosawit]

It is the PowerPC. I still have many legacy programs and files that need snow leopard.

[willmo]

I have ML installed with more features and irritating little bugs now which cant seem to get resolved. When I used SL not as many features but not the irritating little glitches either.

[Crow]

Last time I upgraded the OS was on a G4 tower, from Panther to Tiger. I had to wrestle with irritating bugs (some of which i was never able to squash), applications that were supposed to be compatible but showed signs of instability.

Right now, I'm running Snow Leopard on a 15" MBP. It's stable, my applications run almost flawlessly. I have work to get done. I don't have time to mess with an upgrade.

[scotts13]

One word: Rosetta. In my case, I have a fair number of legacy applications that require it, and no compelling reason to move forward. There's very little new in Lion or ML that I find useful; the iOS stuff should have stayed there. Ditto the social media integration; those are specific, transitory applications/uses, and have no business being integrated into the OS.

So; BIG minus, trivial plusses, many annoyances - no wonder it's the cheapest Mac OS upgrade ever.

[Rygel]

i agree that Snow Leopard was the best. my boot up times have never been as fast as they were when I was still using SL

[cisbell]

One word..."auto-save." One of the dumbest damn things ever created to mess with a professional's life.

[redgeminipa]

Quote

One word..."auto-save." One of the dumbest damn things ever created to mess with a professional's life.

Not so dumb if you don't have a backup power supply and your power goes out unexpectedly...

[rxdawg]

It's a combination of all factors mentioned. Lion is slow, buggy, and unstable. Apple has moved on to ML and seemingly has no further interest in fixing Lion, while also stranding a lot of perfectly good hardware with the choice of suffering with Lion or sticking with SL.

I just downgraded (upgraded?) back to SL last week. I have a stable Mac again instead of Apple's version of Vista.

[anstormacworld]

1) Adobe CS5.5 with all Red Giant plugins working perfectly only happens on Snow Leopard.

2) $0 Writing natively to NTFS drives only happens on 32bit kernel (Snow Leopard)

3) There are 0 new features in Lion and Mountain Lion that is targeted for Professionals

4) There 200++ new features I don't need that will surely compromise system stability and there is only one solution: Stick with Snow Leopard

5) Only God knows if Final Cut Studio 3.0 runs on Mountain Lion

6) Only God knows if Mountain Lion's bootcamp driver has drivers for 2007 MBP 15" Windows 7 64bit

7) Lion & Mountain Lion has a START button renamed into LAUNCHPAD. I already have plenty of Windows 7 PC for that

8) Mac Pro still runs Snow Leopard, unlike other 2012 Macs. It means even Apple admit that Professionals should stick with Snow Leopard

9) The only reason to use Mountain Lion is because 2012 Macs can not support Snow Leopard anymore. I don't even need a MBP upgrade yet. My 2007 MBP 15" has an OWC 6Gb RAM. The only thing I regret about that upgrade: Why the hell I waited until 2011. Should have bought it in 2007-2008

[markbyrn]

That's a link bait title if I ever saw one. XP retained it's massive popularity because the subsequent Windows OS upgrade was loathed even to the point where people with Vista machines were downgrading to XP. On the other hand, OS X 10.7 Lion imposed stiffer hardware requirements such as 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better. So there's the primary answer to your surprisingly uniformed question, "It's unclear why Mac users are holding on to Snow Leopard".

Certainly those who met the hardware requirements either kept Snow Leopard (SL) for support of legacy PowerPC apps or they meet minimum requirements but Lion ran sluggishly on their systems and they reverted back to SL. Of course, with few exceptions, those with newer machines that came with Lion and ML don't even have the option of downgrading to SL.

So even if SL has a healthy retention rate, it's not for any of the unfortunate reasons that XP has retained it's popularity, and XP came out 10 YEARS BEFORE Lion did. You're comparing Apples to Ballmer Lemons.

[EricE]

Yes, there are some nice new features since Snow Leopard but they aren't compelling to many of us. What keeps us using Snow Leopard is the powerful combination of (a) retaining Rosetta to be able to run a few important applications, ( the iOS-influenced user interface of Lion and Mountain Lion that seems less suited to computers and has lost yet more of Apple's legendary interface consistency, and © the bugs (though Mountain Lion has fixed some of those). Snow Leopard doesn't run on PowerPC Macs, which made it far leaner and cleaner than Leopard, and it just runs stably with very few problems. As long as there isn't a strong reason to upgrade, such as some important software that won't run at all under Snow Leopard, I just don't see why to upgrade.

[icerabbit]

Quote

'' It's unclear why Mac users are holding on to Snow Leopard, but one factor may be that it is the newest Apple OS able to run applications written for the PowerPC processor, the Apple/IBM/Motorola-designed CPU used by Macs before Apple announced a switch to Intel in 2005. The first Intel Macs launched in January 2006.

(Snow Leopard will not run on PowerPC-equipped Macs -- the last edition to do so was 2007's OS X Leopard -- but it can run applications written for that chip via the Rosetta utility.)

Another possibility: Many Mac users dinged Lion for being less stable and reliable than Snow Leopard, and said they would stick with the older OS. Those sentiments have also been popular with many Windows XP users. "

I wouldn't say "It's unclear why ..." followed by the three primary reasons.

I would happily update any and all macs to Mountain Lion - IF -

a ) Apple would let older systems qualify
b ) Apple still included Rosetta
c ) Apple would allow users to opt-out of some of the "improvements" also known as annoyances not limited to iOS-iffication. gatekeeper push for the app store, mission control, grey finder, save as, airplay restrictions, keyboard shortcut changes, ...

I'm on my first week with Mountain Lion, have spent hours trying to get some things to work or tweaked back. I pretty much wish my system ran Snow Leopard with the pros of Mountain Lion, but not the cons.

This post has been edited by icerabbit: 05 November 2012 - 07:26 AM