For me, Snow Leopard is the best version of Mac OS X to date. Simple, clean, and above all incredibly streamlined and efficient. So that probably explains why recently released data from Net Applications shows that Snow Leopard still runs on 25% of Macs, ComputerWorld reports (via Cult of Mac). That’s one in four, and I’m proud to say I’m one of them.
ComputerWorld:
Mountain Lion, also known as OS X 10.8, accounted for 25.8% of all Mac operating systems during October, according to statistics from metrics company Net Applications. That represented a three-and-a-half-point increase over September.
For all its gains since then, however, Mountain Lion has not kept pace with the uptake trajectory of Apple’s last two editions, OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, and OS X 10.7, better known as Lion.
Those two grabbed slightly larger shares after three full months of their availability: Snow Leopard accounted for 27% of all Macs by the end of November 2009, and Lion, which launched in July 2011, had a 26.4% share in October 2011.
Snow Leopard is still more popular than Mountain Lion, and the joint most popular version of OS X to date with Lion. That’s got to tell you something about how good it was.
Snow Leopard was released in 2009, and while Apple’s support for it has theoretically dropped, most apps still run on it perfectly. I’mm certainly not upgrading until it’s clear that Snow Leopard is dead and buried – but at the moment we couldn’t be further from it.
The main attractions of Snow Leopard for me and a lot of other people are simple: no iOS features, it’s the smoothest and best performing version of OS X ever and the ability to run PowerPC apps.
I reckon the figures will stay this way for a while, and I’m reassured that I’m not the only one who favours 10.6. In the animal world the Snow Leopard might be endangered, but when it comes to computers, it’s still present in numbers.
