If you’re a Dropbox user (and you should be!) you might want to take a look at your ‘About this Mac’ info box: the popular cloud syncing app will drop support for OS X Leopard and earlier on May 15th.
According to a new support document posted on Dropbox’s official site:
The Dropbox desktop application will no longer support OS X versions 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) starting on May 18th of 2015. On that date, users running these versions of OS X will be signed out and will be unable to sign in or sync using the desktop application on those computers. Existing files and folders inside the Dropbox folder will remain unchanged and will stop syncing through the desktop application.
Chances are, this won’t effect a huge number of people. Most legacy Macs capable of running OS X Leopard are capable of running the more secure OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” operating system.
Also, there’s loads of lead time here. May is just a month before WWDC, which is when we can, according to recent release schedules, expect Apple to debut OS X 10.11. That means that by the time the next version of OS X comes around, Dropbox will be compatible with versions of Mac OS X that are six years old and counting. That’s really not bad at all.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
2 responses to “If you love Dropbox, it’s time to upgrade your Mac”
Dear John: Please kindly send me $1500 so that I may buy a new Mac so that I can continue to use a free Cloud tool.
There are still many many many of us out there with functioning Mac minis running 10.4 and older versions of already paid for Adobe apps. Just check the Dropbox user forums.
I just love when people blithely tell others to do something that is quite expensive.
I’ve known plenty of people with Macs running 10.4-10.5 that could be running 10.7 or newer. They even list that scenario in the article. Also you don’t necessarily have to buy a new mac. One could buy a used 2008 iMac for about $200 now on eBay and run Yosemite fine though I would recommend at least 4 GB of RAM.