On the whole ‘Apple dropping Snow Leopard from support’ thing →

Gregg Keizer at Computerworld:

Apple on Tuesday made it clear that it will no longer patch OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, when it again declined to offer a security update for the four-and-a-half-year-old operating system.

As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, or OS X 10.9, as well as for its two predecessors, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Lion (10.7), Apple had nothing for Snow Leopard or its owners yesterday.

Keizer fails to mention that Snow Leopard wasn’t affected by Apple’s goto fail; bug, but hey, I’m not a security reporter. Let’s move on:

Snow Leopard was also ignored in December, when Apple patched Safari 6 and 7 for newer editions of OS X, but did not update Safari 5.1.10, the most-current Apple browser for the OS.

In that paragraph, Keizer links to this article, in which he writes:

Apple has apparently decided to kill support for OS X Snow Leopard, the 2009 operating system that has resisted retirement for more than a year.

On Monday, Apple did not update Safari 5.1 when it patched the later Safari 6 and 7 for newer editions of OS X, including 2011’s Lion, 2012’s Mountain Lion and this year’s Mavericks.

Keizer is referring to the release of Safari 6.1.1 and Safari 7.0.1, which took place in December of last year.

According to CVE Details, the issue related to user credentials and autofills weren’t an issue in Safari 5.1, as were none of the other CVE-IDs listed in Apple’s document.

I don’t know if Apple’s dropped support for OS X Snow Leopard. It would be weird for the company do it mid-stride, but Keizer’s evidence of Apple’s “apparent” change just don’t add up.