"System audio that stops working when using HDMI or optical audio out"

Where is the LION fix for this?!

In an update to Lion. Which we will probably see in a day or two at most.

I'd sincerely hope Apple will continue to upgrade Snow Leopard with bug fixes and updated peripherial hardware support like print drivers, etc.

The user base has now certainly grown to a point where not everyone can simply upgrade to a new major release. First of all, some older hardware may be too slow or not have enough capacity to run Lion, but may still be sufficient for real world use. Second, especially with an upgrade that technically cannot run everything that worked before (e.g. the no-longer-existing services in Server or the missing Rosetta support), some people will have to stick. I'll leave one of my four Macs on Snow Leopard, because it runs a German accounting software that, until it's 2009 version, only ran in Rosetta emulation because of it's older Filemaker base. It won't be upgraded, but I need to keep those years around to look up records or if an audit comes up, so unless I find a legal and working way to run a VM with Snow, I'll not touch the OS install on that box. Many people will have similar reasons not to upgrade, especially when using pro-grade graphics, design, music and other tools. App upgrades of that magnitude don't happen quickly and they can be quite costly. Surely Apple has a more-ready-to-upgrade userbase, but if you look around and see how many XP or even NT4 boxes are still around, you get the idea.

So supporting a "previous" release of an OS, at least with critical bug fixes and security update, including a formal commitment on how long this will be done (i.e. 5 years after it stopped shipping or so) is one of the steps a software company has to take to be taken seriously.

Let's see - I hope AI is not right with it's "the last update" prediction this time - it would't really look nice for Apple.

F.

Almost certainly, the unusual step of releasing an update with the same version number as the last one was done primarily so that they would still have 10.6.9 left for other fixes.

I would say the versioning numbers suggest that this is the *second* last update for 10.6, which sounds about right given that there is rarely more than one or two updates after the new full number version comes out.

Right. This fix isn't big enough for a .x.x release and Apple doesn't want to extend it to the .x.x.x structure.

So be just like MSFT to be taken seriously, eh? Apple has traditionally dragged its users kicking and screaming into the future whether they like it or not. It has worked out quite well for them it would seem. I see no reason for them to change their stripes now.

This seems like decent evidence to support the principle of not updating to a new major release until the first dot update.

It appears that this Snow Leopard update has as much to do with ensuring a trouble free transition to Lion as anything else.

I'll probably wait another week or two just to make sure the kinks are ironed out before I switch to 10.7

It's your choice of course, but I always wonder why anyone does this (waits). it's not like the bugs and glitches in a new version of OS-X are really ever *that* bad. This is one of the better ones, but even the worst updates ever are only really bad news for a tiny fraction of users and if it's a serious bug it's usually fixed within a week.

Pretty much all the bugs I've encountered so far are minor video glitches and silly stuff that doesn't matter, with the exception of a giant privacy hole that has been introduced in Safari 5.1 and that's a "design choice" and unlikely to be fixed at all. Especially since no one seems to have noticed it yet or cares about it so far.

My thoughts exactly. I use a Mac Mini for a Media PC, and whenever I play an M4V with stereo AAC via optical out, it often stops working shortly after, requiring a reboot to get things working again. I was hoping the update to Lion would fix it, but unfortunately the problem exists there as well.

Here's hoping they put out the patch for Lion in the inevitable post-release update.

When did Apple remove the "Download Only" option in Apple Software Update? I came to download this update and this was there instead:



A quick Google and Apple Community search seems to suggest that I'm the first to notice it...

EDIT: And, for that matter, the "Install and Keep Package" is also gone.