Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure how much longer Snow Leopard or Lion will continue to get security updates from Apple. Apple eventually seemed to change its mind about supporting the then two-generations-old Snow Leopard after Mountain Lion became available, but only after a long delay before patching 121 vulnerabilities in Snow Leopard’s version of Safari that had been accumulating for several months. Apple continues to release Java 6 updates for Snow Leopard (and for Macs that have upgraded from Snow Leopard to a later version of OS X) even though Oracle is no longer making Java 6 patches available to the general public-which could possibly mean that Apple is paying Oracle for the privilege of obtaining the latest Java patches for older Macs.įor many generations of Mac OS X, Apple only released patches for OS vulnerabilities in the current and one previous version of the operating system. The now three-generations-old operating system costs Apple money and developer resources whenever a new security vulnerability needs to be patched. That’s not a good thing, because it could mean that Apple may not patch security vulnerabilities for those Macs for much longer.Īpple might stop releasing security updates for Snow Leopard in the near future. Some older Macs can’t even be upgraded to Lion, meaning they’ll be stuck with Snow Leopard (version 10.6.8) or older. However, some Macs are still limited to Lion (version 10.7.5), which might possibly still receive security updates for the next year or two, given Apple’s recent track record with providing Snow Leopard security updates after two newer versions of OS X were released. This means that if your Mac was compatible with Mountain Lion, you’ll be able to upgrade to Mavericks. Unlike most major new Mac OS X updates, Apple chose to continue supporting all the same Macs as the previous release of the operating system. The wait is finally over: Apple released a new version of its Mac operating system, OS X Mavericks (version 10.9).

Late 2006 macbook pro