Net Applications: 18% of Mac Users Have Upgraded to Snow Leopard

[Winni]

Personally, I can't stand XP. It's older than sin, it's clunky, and the UI is outdated and ugly.

Who gives a damn? XP is rock solid, fast, it WORKS - and Microsoft will officially support it until 2014. So it's still a safe bet to use XP and for most users -- including users who do VERY "techy" stuff -- there absolutely is no reason to upgrade to a newer version of Windows.

By 2014, Windows XP alone will have had a longer life than all versions of OS X. All the people who talk so much about Apple's "outstanding support" should think about that for a minute before they go on bashing Microsoft and PC vendors. Apples makes their operating systems - and hardware - faster obsolete than Microsoft releases Service Packs. If you want longevity, choose a PC with a Microsoft OS.

 

[WickedCobra03]

I imagine there are a lot of mac users running PPC machines but it will continue to grow each month

Same. I am actually using a Power PC iMac to write this post right now and I already have Leopard on the macbook so I dunno if I really need to upgrade... yeah, even if it is only $29, I dropped like $129 for CS3 and that was with a school discount. Hell, I would still be working on Photoshop 7 from 2002 if it were not for the Raw 3.x support that came with CS2 or CS3. I dunno, but otherwise I probably would have not jumped. Not much can be done today that couldn't be done realistically with a 5 year old version of photoshop. Anyone else see their upgrades as somewhat marginal unless you are a big name game developer, graphic designer, movie studio ... ect?

 

[HyperZboy]

Who gives a damn? XP is rock solid, fast, it WORKS - and Microsoft will officially support it until 2014. So it's still a safe bet to use XP and for most users -- including users who do VERY "techy" stuff -- there absolutely is no reason to upgrade to a newer version of Windows.

By 2014, Windows XP alone will have had a longer life than all versions of OS X. All the people who talk so much about Apple's "outstanding support" should think about that for a minute before they go on bashing Microsoft and PC vendors. Apples makes their operating systems - and hardware - faster obsolete than Microsoft releases Service Packs. If you want longevity, choose a PC with a Microsoft OS.

You're half right. Keep in mind, the only reason Microsoft is continuing to support XP for so long is because of VISTA delays and that VISTA was so poorly received and adopted.

Apple used to have a much longer support cycle. Macs supported booting into MacOS 9 up until 10.2.3 was released & MacOS 9 software in classic mode worked through 10.4.11! All of the versions of OSX up until 10.5 Leopard supported a wide range of older Macs and there were many unsupported options for installing MacOS X even through 10.5.8. The oldest Mac that 10.5 officially supported was released in 2001. That's not too shabby for support.

10.6 Snow Leopard throws a significant number of Mac users under the bus in just a 3 year time period, which is sad and breaks with Apple precedent. This is where you are correct. Snow Leopard really screws over a lot of Mac users as far as support or lack thereof.

What's salt in the wound is that development of Leopard 10.5 appears to have stopped even though its still got quite a few bugs. I still report crashes and kernel panics to Apple weekly on various PowerPC Macs, but I don't think Apple cares anymore.

What Apple should have done is split out Leopard & Snow Leopard in 2 different development teams, one for PowerPC, one for INTEL, and deliver many of Snow Leopard's bug fixes and features to both platforms. Obviously some things in Snow Leopard clearly won't work well on PowerPC Macs, but much of it will in fact. This is a myth that none of Snow Leopard could work on Powermac or iMac G5s. Apple clearly made a mistake and the 18% adoption number kind of confirms that mistake. At $29, this thing should be flying off the shelves. Clearly it is not.

 

[SkyBell]

Personally, I can't stand XP. It's older than sin, it's clunky, and the UI is outdated and ugly.

I've got the Se7en Transformation Pack installed on my netbook which has XP. Makes it look like Windows 7, while keeping the same basic structure. Not what you had in mind, but it could be a good fix for a lot of people who still like XP. And I'm happy that it prevents me from shelling out the money for 7 in two weeks.

Agree.

Tiger works very well on a wide variety of platforms.

I'm currently dual booting Tiger and Snow Leopard with my MBP15. Snow Leopard has some nice features. But overall, I like the simplicity of Tiger.

Yeah, I ran Tiger as my main OS for three years. I've got Leopard on my eMac's HDD now because Tiger just isn't supported by so many of the apps I use these days. It's sad, really. But I have a Tiger partition on my external HDD that I love to use when I get the chance. Just a great OS, clean, solid as a rock and simple.