Apple quietly pulls support for OS X Snow Leopard

Apple appears to have pulled the plug on support for OS X Snow Leopard, leaving a fifth of Macs vulnerable to attack.

Apple hasn't released a security update for the OS since September, suggesting the company may have finally ended support, as noted by ComputerWorld.

Snow Leopard was missing from the latest round of OS X security updates this month, which included fixes for Mavericks as well as older versions Lion and Mountain Lion.

It was also left out of a December round of updates that only patched versions of Safari compatible with newer releases of OS X.

Snow Leopard was released more than four years ago and remains a popular OS with Mac users, installed on 19% of Macs, according to NetMarketShare stats cited by ComputerWorld.

Mavericks is the most popular version of OS X, installed on 42% of Macs. It's also the last version of OS X capable of running applications for PowerPC, the CPU Apple ditched for Intel in 2006.

Apple hasn't responded to a request for comment and, unlike Microsoft, doesn't issue guidance on when it might end support.

This article originally appeared at pcpro.co.uk