I am still running Snow Leopard on my late 2010 Macbook Pro. Are there potentially any benefits of still using this version of the Mac OS, or am I more disadvantaged by not being on the latest version – Mountain Lion.
Some people have informed me that Mountain Lion is very iOS-eque in nature, and they feel that this really should be kept to iOS devices such as the iPhone & iPad, and not brought into the "computing environment", such is the case that if they were able to downgrade to Snow Leopard they would – however they inform me that their brand new iMacs are of an "architecture" that does not permit this.
Another person informed me that security updates for Snow Leopard ended some months ago, and it is now officially an unsupported OS (although I dont believe this to be the case), thus Lion is now the oldest supported OS.
Any clarification on the above is very welcomed……..
Best Answer
Pros:
1) Speed. 10.6.x runs faster on older hardware, particularly if you only have a regular hard drive. I see the beachball much more often in Mountain Lion than I did in Snow Leopard because my MBPro only has a 5400-RPM drive and ML seems to access the hard disk a lot more. SSD is preferred for Lion and Mountain Lion.
2) Colored icons in the Finder sidebar. Apple made them grayscale in 10.7 and 10.8, a huge step back for usability. There is a hack that will re-enable color, but it can cause Finder instability.
3) Rosetta. If you upgrade to 10.7/10.8, you'll lose the ability to run apps based on PPC code.
Cons:
1) No iCloud. There are workarounds but I've never been able to get them to work properly or reliably.
2) Security updates. However, you can "stay safe" just by keeping Flash up-to-date (or uninstall it and only use Chrome for Flash), disabling Java in your web browsers, avoiding pirated software, running Little Snitch, and periodically running AV software.
These are the ones that stand out to me. I'm sure others can add to this list.