Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Support Post-1.5
We maintain a database which records system information for all license registrations from users kind enough to leave the “Include anonymous system information” option checked. This information allows us to track how Cornerstone is being used.
As of 4th October 2009, registrations are distributed by operating system version as follows:
| Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger | 4.7% |
| Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard | 86.8% |
| Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard | 8.5% |
There are two important points to note from these numbers:
- Only 4.7% of all registrations between July ’08 and October ’09 were on Tiger.
- Almost 2x as many registrations have been made on Snow Leopard even though a) it has only been on the market for 5 weeks, and b) we only started supporting 10.6 with 1.5 which was released at the end of September.
Either Tiger users are coy enough about their OS to routinely uncheck “Include anonymous system information”, or Cornerstone usage on Tiger is extremely low. We suspect it’s the latter.
A second interesting datapoint is the number of Tiger-based browser hits against zennaware.com:
Over the 15 months since the site went live, less than 1% of all hits have came from browsers running on 10.4. To put this in perspective, roughly 10x as many visitors to zennaware.com are running some version of Windows, and we don’t even sell any products for their operating system! This leads us to believe that next to nobody in Cornerstone’s target market uses 10.4 as their primary operating system, which shouldn’t really surprise anybody.
So with these figures in mind we have decided that 1.5 will be the last version of Cornerstone to support 10.4 Tiger.
Mac developers started releasing Leopard-only applications very soon after the release of 10.5 and we think this will be even more the case with Snow Leopard if Apple’s sales figures are anything to go by. As a result we believe that the number of Cornerstone users requiring Tiger support will decrease rapidly and that the development resources required to continue supporting 10.4 can no longer be justified.
1.5.x maintenance releases will continue to support 10.4, but the next major update to Cornerstone will require 10.5 or newer.