Snow Leopard Breaks Some App Compatibility

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Some of your software won't play nice with new kitty.

Diehard Mac users today will be joining the latest and greatest operating system from Apple as today Mac OS X 10.6, also known as Snow Leopard, starts selling at retailers worldwide.

While Snow Leopard isn't an entirely new operating system from the ground up, as with any new version jump, there are bound to be some incompatibilities. As listed on the Apple Support site, the following applications don't play nice with Snow Leopard:

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0
• Aperture ver. 2.1.1 and earlier
• Keynote ver. 2.0.2 and earlier
• AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow ver. 4.2.5
• Parallels Desktop ver. 3.0
• VirusBarrier X4 ver. 10.4.4 and earlier
• SPSS 17 ver. 17.1
• Director MX 2004 ver. 10.2
• EyeTV ver. 3.0.0 to 3.1.0
• Ratatouille ver. 1.1

If you have one of the above software and plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard, Apple suggests that you look for a newer version or an alternative.

Perhaps the biggest incompatibility of all is Snow Leopard's requirement of an Intel processor, leaving all of those still running Power PC processors having plain old Leopard as their final destination.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
45 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Wait.... McAfee VirusScan and Norton AntiVirus won´t work properly? WTF!!! I thought no anti-virus was needed for Mac, mmmmmm, someone has been making false statements!!!! lolol
    Reply
  • jhansonxi
    I consider broken compatibility with McAfee and Norton a benefit. It will encourage users to find anti-malware apps that don't hog system resources and add more holes than they fix.
    Reply
  • daship
    LOL apple fail.
    Reply
  • exar333
    "Apple, it just works?"
    Reply
  • mcreskiller
    "apple, it just works when we want it to"
    Reply
  • tayb
    Had it delivered today and it just finished installing. Have to say, very much underwhelming. I don't know why I was expecting more having known that it was a "behind the scenes" upgrade but I still was. After having used it for an hour I can't honestly say for certain that the machine feels any snappier. It was already fast with the previous version. I suppose if I benchmarked some things I would notice a difference but from normal usage I don't really notice anything different at all.

    Very disappointed. Could have bought a couple cases of Dos for $30.
    Reply
  • SneakySnake
    None of those apps are either popular or current, look at those version numbers, I think Parallels is at 5.0 right now, but 4.0 at least
    Reply
  • tayb
    I do have to say, however, that it did free up quite a bit of space and the new expose is pretty useful. It's not as intuitive as the Windows 7 taskbar because you have to hold down the icon and wait for expose to kick in and then you can switch between open windows of the same program whereas Windows 7 you just hover over the icon and all the open windows show up as a thumbnail. Different way of doing it but I think Windows does it better. Still useful though.
    Reply
  • hellwig
    Antivirus versions listed are probably older versions. And if Apple added new "security features" these might have disabled some backdoor those antivirus programs were using. Remember it took a while before Symantec and McAfee had anti-virus for Vista, and Microsoft got those beta's out the door long before they released it.
    Reply
  • abhik
    Seeing as this is an apple product. doesnt this become a feature?

    Wait a minute...come to think of it...hey! i want my programs to not work either. screw you microsoft!!!
    Reply