Mavericks came out of the gate with numerous security improvements, and we recommend that the first thing you should do to stay secure on your Mac is to upgrade.

Our own survey of Macs running Sophos Anti-Virus, conducted at the start of 2014, showed that only about 18% of enterprise Mac users are running Mavericks, with 19% still running the out-of-support Snow Leopard. Since Apple released Mavericks in October 2013, a lot of people have upgraded, but the majority of Mac users are still running something older.įor business users, companies have been even slower to upgrade than home users. In order to get Mac users to upgrade to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple is giving away the upgrade for free: a good move by Apple, but not everyone is up to date. Poor Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) is left out in the cold. Similarly, the OS X 10.9.1 point release was not accompanied by corresponding updates for 10.7 and 10.8 users.īut in Apple’s latest Mac security update, when Mavericks 10.9.2 was released, the company published security fixes for Lion and Mountain Lion at the same time. When Apple released OS X 10.9, better known as Mavericks, it included a raft of security fixes that didn’t come out for OS X 10.7 (Lion) or 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Windows XP users have known for a long time (or should know by now) that Microsoft is ending support for XP in April.ĭoes anyone really know when Apple will end support for previous releases of OS X, or even what its current commitment is to support those versions? Microsoft also has a long view about product retirement that appears to be totally lacking in Apple’s case.

This can leave many users unaware of the updates and even unconcerned with their own security. Unlike Microsoft, which has a long-standing and regular process for providing security updates, Apple simply provides updates when it feels like it. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have a good reputation for transparency about security updates.

Security for Macs is often a hotly-debated topic, perhaps because Apple has a reputation for security that is based more on a brand promise than reality.

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