Who is using older OS X and why?

Last iOS 5 user said:

Although I'm sure a lot of you have upgraded to Mavericks or Yosemite, who still runs older versions of OSX and why?

I still run Lion because I like it better and it's NOT because it was a product of Steve Jobs, but because it's less iOS-like (iOS-likeness was show up a little bit in this OS but 10.8, 10.9 showed more and 10.10 is all iOS'ed out) and I like distinguished Mac and iOS.

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I am not one of those guys you is jumping on everything new Apple offers me.
I am still using Snow Leopard because it is extremely rock solid but I am also using Mavericks (before that is was Lion).
What I don't understand is this "OS X is too much iOS". I don't get it. Yes, the color choice in Yosemite is kind of iOS style and I am not sure whether I will update or not. But Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks? I don't get it. Most part of these 3 versions are more OS X than iOS.

Have a 2006 iMac that cannot go beyond SL.

I still have my MBP running ML. This computer is mission critical to me. When Mavericks first came out, I saw no compelling features. I did see that they continued to remove features that are important to me such as cvs. For quite some time, octave was not available for Mavericks. I can get all of these features back with macports, but it took some time for macports to recover from all the development tool chain changes in Mavericks. I think I could get to Mavericks now and have all the tools I need, still Mavericks really doesn't seem to add any value to me, so why take the chance on loosing time.

When I first heard about Yosemite and the iPhone integration I thought that I may finally make a jump once it is ready and stable. However, from my reading so far, it appears that most of those integration features will not be available for my 2010 MBP.

Lion's hardly any different to 10.8 and 10.9 in terms of iOS-ness, though ML and Mavericks are both much faster and more stable.

In fact, Mavericks bought hardly any 'iOS features' - only iBooks and Maps, which you can ignore if you wish. It also made it a lot more stable and faster.

You're shooting yourself in the foot not upgrading from Lion.

On my mid-2010 MacBook Pro 13", I still use 10.6.8. It came with 10.6, runs well with it, I really don't need any features offered by "new software", so I leave it alone. One of these days I may upgrade it to 10.8.5, but not yet. It will -never- go beyond 10.8.5 in my hands.

My late-2012 Mac Mini came with 10.8.2, which I've upgraded to 10.8.5 and it's going to stay that way for years into the future. I've experimented with Mavericks (installed onto an external drive) and found its performance to be staggering -- as in, "stammeringly and staggeringly SLOW". Beachballs EVERYwhere. Can take much time to launch even a simple app like TextEdit. I'll reckon this has something to do with the way Apple changed memory management in Mavericks vis-a-vis earlier versions of OS X, but in any case, I don't see any reason to "upgrade" to it for day-to-day usage.
By comparison, 10.8.5 zips along running off my "external booter" (Crucial m500 in a plugable.com "lay-flat" USB3/SATA dock).

My venerable late 2006 iMac still runs fine on 10.7.5, and that's as far as it can go, in any case.

Judging from the performance (or, better-stated, NON-performance) of Mavericks on the 2012 Mini, I have no desire or intention to ever move beyond 10.8.5 unless or until some software requirement demands it....

I am. My Macs are from 2008 and 2009. Don't think I can run the latest.

My Mac is from 2007. It won't run Mountain Lion. I still use Snow Leopard. But a new Mac is on the horizon.

My stuff is from 2009-10-11 . Running 10.6.8 and Lion . After a disaster 'upgrading' to Mavericks on my 2010 15" Macbook , and subsequent waste of a few days getting everything restored back to where it was , I've currently got little desire for upgrading much past 10.8 .

I'm using Mavericks on my main, every day computer, my late 2011 Macbook Pro.

With that said, I still use a couple of older computers on a regular basis, and as such can not upgrade them any further. My Powermac G5 has Leopard(10.5) on it and my "Quicksilver" G4(which probably gets used as much as the G5) is currently running Tiger(10.4) and OS 9. My G4 is capable of running Leopard, or at least has been since I upgraded it to dual 1ghz processors, but for the time being I'm sticking with Tiger.

I have another G4 lying around with multiple hard drives and partitions, and have 10.1, 10.3, and 10.4 installed on it(as well as OS 9). I have no particular reason for this, other than it's interesting to see the evolution of the operating system through the various versions.

Finally, I have a G3 that is running 10.2, the maximum version this particular computer is officially capable of running(although there are work-arounds that I haven't yet explored).

I started with Lion, and used it fairly extensively. I don't feel like the differences between Lion and Mavericks are that great(I skipped Mountain Lion), but I feel like many of the changes made in Mavericks are real improvements. In particular, when I'm using multiple monitors, the ability to switch between virtual desktops independently on the two monitors in Mavericks makes a big difference.

On my main computer (hackintosh) I just recently upgraded to mavericks. This computer is what I do most of my audio work on so it needs to be stable, so it stays about 1 os x version behind. When 10.9.3 came out I finally upgraded from ml. When 10.10.3 or 10.10.4 comes out I will probably upgrade to Yosemite. My macbook pro and my vivobook have been on mavericks from day 1, and will be moving to Yosemite upon official release. I use those computers as sort of a test bed to see how stable my most used applications are. My htpc (dell xps 720) is on 10.8.5, and probably won't be updated any time soon, because I don't really care and also because it's got enough problems already running osx, I don't need any more problems from updating it.

Lion.There are too many compatibility issues with newest ones.

klamzi said:

Lion.There are too many compatibility issues with newest ones.

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Oh the irony. Lion sucked so badly they should have called it Vista!

My Mac Mini was on Snow Leopard for the longest time - then I upgraded its ram and replaced the disk with an SSD. At that point I went with Mavericks.

I like SL, as it was a bit leaner and more stable with such an older machine - at least that's what I thought and didn't want to take a chance.

I just upgraded my 2010 MBP to Mavericks as well, that was on ML, for similar reasons but I needed some apps that wouldn't run on ML, so on to Mavericks. Its been good on that machine as well.

Yeah, I did the same.

I disliked Lion so much (mainly performance related) that I managed to get the recovery disks from an early-2011 at work and put Snow Leopard back on my late-2011.

I regularly use Snow Leopard. It's simply too polished and fast to stop using it. It works with every application I want to use on it.

I just reinstalled SL on my 2009 Macbook Pro and my Macmini 2010, and in a nostalgic kind of way, it has reminded me of the day when Apple strived to be efficient and stable. I've tried everything up to the latest version of Mavericks, and I can definitively say that Apple has slowly been loosing the edge when it comes to stability and efficiency over the years. It is quite sad that SL, imo, was the last great OS.

With Yosemite down the road, all Ive seen thus far, is more fluff and notification crap that I could care less about. Not all of us want our computers completely integrated with our phones, particularly if it comes at the cost of stability and speed. Very sad, but for me I'm kind of over the direction Apple is taking with their OS's.

Xurrently running maverick, though I wasn't too quick to upgrade to it, however this time I think I'll upgrade directly when yosemite comes out, together with getting an iphone, The new combined features looked nice and i'm in the mood to test them.

I'm running the latest available for each machine - so for the PPC iMacs and iBook it is Leopard, the Dell Mini Snow Leopard and the 2 MacBooks use Mavericks.
No issues, each individual Mac is rock solid with whatever OS X is installed, and mostly using the appropriate versions of the same apps.

Cheers

Hugh

Currently, both of my main Macs run 10.4 Tiger: solid, simple and useful to this day. But, I will be trying out 10.5 Leopard on my PowerBook after I upgrade the memory and see how it does.

My MacBook is on 10.6 Snow Leopard; I had 10.7 Lion on a (now dead) iMac for a while, and wasn't impressed with the new features, nor the horror stories I had read, so never saw a need to upgrade it.

I have a 2008 white Macbook "backup machine" that runs whatever is the latest those things could run. Snow Leopard maybe? Lion? I have a 2005 G4 Mac mini that still runs Leopard (when I switch it on which is pretty rare these days).

really depends on what you're doing e.g. want to cut your teeth on apple script then given the age of most examples and tutorials you're probably better with an earlier OS version (SL or Lion) initially than having to work around and alter things to cope with the sandboxing in ML or Mavericks.

snorkelman said:

really depends on what you're doing e.g. want to cut your teeth on apple script then given the age of most examples and tutorials you're probably better with an earlier OS version (SL or Lion) initially than having to work around and alter things to cope with the sandboxing in ML or Mavericks.

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What would you have to work around or alter as an AppleScript user (as opposed to an application developer)? There are no restrictions on receiving Apple events for sandboxed applications. So for personal automation nothing really has changed due to sandboxing.

On the other hand, here are some reason you might want to upgrade to the latest version of OS X if you're interested in system automation:

- Script Templates
- Cocoa-AppleScript Applets
- Script Libraries (including AppleScript/Objective-C Libraries)
- use-Statement
- Notifications
- interleaved argument syntax
- JavaScript OSA component (Yosemite)

Just dumped Mavericks and reinstalled Snow Leopard on my 2009 MBP.
(Yes, it's a 5-year-old computer, but the 17-inch screen is still gorgeous, just like the day I got it. I'd like to upgrade to something with USB 3 ports, but none of what I've seen from Apple of late would justify the price.)

I liked the security improvements in Mavericks. But it's just too damn slow. Almost 2 minutes to boot to working? With Snow Leopard, I'm back to full booting in just over 30 seconds (HDD, not a SSD)!

And a lot of other little annoyances with Mavericks, like not being able to disable the desktop effects. Not to mention the one that really ground my gears -- they took away the large file/folder name color labels and replaced them with tiny colored dots.

SL on the machines that can run it. L, ML and M have probably occupied more of my time in the last few years than the previous 28 years with Apple computers. I've actually put all new purchases on hold until Apple can get reliable I/O on M.

Using the iPad for just about everything other than running a mini as a media center (SL) or post processing photos. I'm pretty much in a so-what mood as to new OS's from Apple.

fessen said:

Just dumped Mavericks and reinstalled Snow Leopard on my 2009 MBP.
(Yes, it's a 5-year-old computer, but the 17-inch screen is still gorgeous, just like the day I got it. I'd like to upgrade to something with USB 3 ports, but none of what I've seen from Apple of late would justify the price.)

I liked the security improvements in Mavericks. But it's just too damn slow. Almost 2 minutes to boot to working? With Snow Leopard, I'm back to full booting in just over 30 seconds (HDD, not a SSD)!

And a lot of other little annoyances with Mavericks, like not being able to disable the desktop effects. Not to mention the one that really ground my gears -- they took away the large file/folder name color labels and replaced them with tiny colored dots.

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I posted this in another thread, but it fits your post exactly:

Anyone that complains about system performance that is still running a spinning platter has no leg to stand on.

Moving forward, you simply need an SSD for acceptable speed, (read: MacBook Airs, rMBP, Fusion Drive for iMac, etc.)

Also, many, many apps require Mavericks for the new API's (just check the App Store: Pixelmator, Omnifocus 2, Final Cut, Sunrise Calendar, OneNote, etc.).

For any actions that you can still use SL for, there will be more in the future that begin to require Mavs. Just ask any developer.

Furthermore, you can expect to need to upgrade your hardware just the same for Yosemite performance, so you might as well do it now. You're only delaying the inevitable.