Apple also announced a new record for Mac sales: 4.89 million, or 760,000 more than in any previous quarters. Two months later, by the end of Apple's fourth quarter, another 5 million had downloaded it, perhaps in part enticed by a dramatic price cut, to $30 from $129. The next day, Apple announced a million downloads had already taken place, making Lion the fastest-selling Mac OS release in the company's history. SLIDESHOW: Mac OS X Lion's top 20 features NETWORK WORLD's HOTTEST TECH ARGUMENTS: Read them all here
Those included multi-touch gestures, system-wide support for full screen apps, revamped Mail application, a new way to see easily all running applications and active windows (called Mission Control), the now-built-in Mac App Store (analogous to the iOS App Store for finding and downloading programs), and Launchpad, a full-screen, grid-like display of available applications, which can be re-arranged and grouped into folders. I’m productive with OS X 10.6 daily, and if you’re looking for a bargain in Mac computing, those 2006-2007 machines can run it with 1 GB of memory, run it nicely with 2 GB, and run it quite well with 3 GB of more.Lion, or formally Mac OS X 10.7, was finally released July 20, 2011, with over 250 new features. Overall, having a very modern browser that’s not longer being updated – whether Firefox or Chrome – keeps Snow Leopard a useful platform for years to come. OmniWeb 5.11.2 (no updates since 2012, but version 6.0 was in development last August with OS X 10.10 Yosemite support).Kindle 1.9.71 (2015) and earlier will launch but cannot register with Amazon’s servers.Safari 5.1.10 (2013), the first browser to drop OS X 10.6 support.
Here’s a list of software I use that’s left behind Snow Leopard users and the last compatible versions: For browsers, Firefox is current (the last version for OS X 10.8 and earlier), Chrome is barely not current (with the same limitations – the latest version already requires OS X 10.9 or later), and Opera still supports Snow Leopard. With the exception of iTunes not supporting iPhones and iPads running iOS 9 and later and the version of Safari with Snow Leopard being so old that some sites will complain that it is an unsupported browsers, none of the other “left behind” issues matter much. (Prior to LibreOffice 4.3, you had to export AppleWorks spreadsheets to Microsoft Excel format and then import that into LibreOffice – which is what I’ve already done with most of my spreadsheets.) It may also open AppleWorks spreadsheets, drawings, and paintings, although I haven’t yet tried that. Moving forward, I am transitioning to LibreOffice, a freeware office suite that seems to do everything Microsoft Office does (at least everything I need) – and it imports AppleWorks 6 word processing documents.
Best of all, for an old timer like me who has been using AppleWorks since it arrived as ClarisWorks 1.0 for System 7 on my Mac Plus way back in 1991, Snow Leopard is the last version of OS X to run AppleWorks, giving me access to 15 years worth of documents. Snow Leopard is less demanding of resources and will even run nicely on those first-generation Intel Macs with Core Duo processors and a 2 GB memory ceiling. It was the last version of OS X not to roll in iOS-like features like the Launcher (above) and unnatural scrolling. Point of fact, I am running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on that Mac mini (2.0 GHz, 3 GB RAM, Samsung 850 EVO SSD). With OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple began adding iOS-like features to the Mac, such as the Launcher (above) and “natural” scrolling.