4 ms·

Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel li

Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks. Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.

mikeokner 9y ago
Yep, agree 100%. 10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.
snowwrestler 9y ago
Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs. Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too. So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.
- spronkey 9y ago
  To be honest, Snow Leopard was an immediate improvement on the abomination that was Leopard. The only reason, to me, that I remember Snow Leopard as being so good is because Leopard was a steaming pile of slow shit.
jjoonathan 9y ago
Ditto on Snow Leopard. I had to muck through the version history to figure out which release I was considering the "last good, exciting release." Turns out we all agree. The divide is... stark. That said, High Sierra seems to trend back up towards the level of ambition we saw in the 200x releases. 2001 10.1 Puma: First OS X to ship by default 2002 10.2 Jaguar: GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4 2003 10.3 Panther: Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine 2005 10.4 Tiger: Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video 2007 10.5 Leopard: Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel 2009 10.6 Snow Leopard: App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM 2011 10.7 Lion: Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch 2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center 2013 10.9 Mavericks: iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration 2014 10.10 Yosemite: Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff 2015 10.11 El Capitan: San Francisco font, Metal API 2016 10.12 Sierra: Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift 2017 10.13 High Sierra: HEVC, APFS, VR

mikeokner 9y ago

Yep, agree 100%. 10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.

snowwrestler 9y ago

Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs. Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too. So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.

spronkey 9y ago
To be honest, Snow Leopard was an immediate improvement on the abomination that was Leopard. The only reason, to me, that I remember Snow Leopard as being so good is because Leopard was a steaming pile of slow shit.

jjoonathan 9y ago

Ditto on Snow Leopard. I had to muck through the version history to figure out which release I was considering the "last good, exciting release." Turns out we all agree. The divide is... stark. That said, High Sierra seems to trend back up towards the level of ambition we saw in the 200x releases. 2001 10.1 Puma: First OS X to ship by default 2002 10.2 Jaguar: GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4 2003 10.3 Panther: Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine 2005 10.4 Tiger: Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video 2007 10.5 Leopard: Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel 2009 10.6 Snow Leopard: App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM 2011 10.7 Lion: Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch 2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center 2013 10.9 Mavericks: iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration 2014 10.10 Yosemite: Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff 2015 10.11 El Capitan: San Francisco font, Metal API 2016 10.12 Sierra: Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift 2017 10.13 High Sierra: HEVC, APFS, VR