Why, on Earth, would you release an upgrade from a popular software, only for a limited number of users because your new, improved, released software supports only the last operative system? Why the people behind Papers released the long-long-long time awaited Papers2 only for Snow Leopard Users?
I was recently reading a post regarding why Mac users still use Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. Lack of time to make the upgrade, the sense of the upgrade being unnecessary, specially considering that you have to pay for the upgrade, and reports about several bugs and incompatibilities, lead users so use Leopard even today. Most of my scientists friends are Leopard users, and also Papers1.x users, and I believe that they are happy. Despite the lack of features awaited for a long time. Even considering that Mendeley is free and always improving. And considering that, for example, Mendeley Lite for iPad is free, in contrast to Papers for iPad (which, by the way, still lacks many features).
But I have been a strong supporter of Papers. I truly believed that, somehow, old Papers1.x users were going to be awarded because of their loyalty. But the upgrade price seems to be a barrier for many, specially for students (and I believe that the new Mac-Student users will turn undoubtedly to Mendeley and Endnote), and to me (and I am pretty sure that for many others too), the need of having Snow Leopard puts another big issue to deal with.
Also, some reports about missing features, bugs and others (see http://support.mekentosj.com/discussions/problems/3118-papers-2-going-back-to-papers-1). The only explanation I found regarding this “hard” decision is:
Unfortunately Papers2 requires 10.6. This was a hard decision, because we know we still have a small percentage of Papers1 users running OS X Leopard 10.5. However, supporting 10.5 had also a lot of technical consequences. In particular, with OS X Lion 10.7 coming soon, we might have had to cut 10.5 support later, which would have been much more difficult to do on paying costumers.
Note of course that your copy of Papers1 will still work the exact same way as it does today on 10.5 for as long as needed.
I believe that the company does not care about loyal, old users of Papers. They say the percentage of Leopard users is small. In my experience, this percentage is pretty close to 100% (maybe because I am in a small, less-developed country, I don’t know), but this only decision is enough to me to decide not to upgrade to Papers2, and I recommend to you to do the same.
In the future, I will be featuring new softwares and tools for scientists, to compensate somehow this huge turn-off.
Astu's science blog 