11 ms·

How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability

71 points by rusk 8y ago

whywhywhywhy 8y ago
Anyone who has used every version of OSX will tell you it's not a myth. Although I agree it is mostly remembered because Lion was such an awful release and objectively a step backwards that took a good few more releases to finally recover from.
- mitchty 8y ago
  Hi, user of OS X from 10.2 to present. It’s a myth. Snow leopard was not some mythical stable release without bugs. Hell it had the remove your home directory bug when logging in as a guest. I’ve personally had no real problems with the recent releases, I know a fair amount of people inmy camp too. Angry people are just more vocal. I know there are a ton of hn posters that will disagree but this whole thing is like windows 2000 being the most stable release of windows. Or more recently windows 7.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    >angry people are more vocal That is a big thing. Kinda like this mac book pro is fine as long as you don’t get a bad keyboard.
    - pdpi 8y ago
      The 15" one I had at my previous job had graphics corruption issues (just big red — presumably untextured — rectangles all over the place), and I have to restart my current 13" one at my current job every couple of days because one of the thunderbolt ports will give up on outputting video on a regular basis (and won't recover until I restart). I also lose audio on this one every few days. I'll accept a dud as unlucky. Two in a row feels sloppy. The keyboard is only one of many problems these laptops have.
      - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        An 8600M GT killed my '07 15" and I've sworn off discrete graphics ever since.
        peatmoss 8y ago
        While the long-term plan for Apple appears to be to move everything to their own silicon, I wonder if we'll see a hardware refresh based on a 7nm AMD Ryzen chip between now and then. The integrated graphics on AMD seem to be relatively performant compared to Intel's, and I can't imagine AMD not having pretty good power characteristics at 7nm.
        chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        Maybe this is 2005 Me talking, but I simply don't trust AMD to do anything well. To be fair, both Intel and them have had high profile failures where the product either didn't work at all or didn't perform adequately (Itanium and Bulldozer). The AMD I remember also had a tendency to over estimate performance and underclock parts, (1800+, anyone?) even if they could sell them for less. It's this part that makes me think Apple wouldn't want to deal with them. For all of Intel's missteps, Apple choosing AMD because they are the cheaper alternative smells weird to me.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    Lion, however was a slow, buggy resource hog that bought older Macs to their knees. 10.6.8 was, by comparison fantastic. Mountain Lion started fixing the damage.
  - stetrain 8y ago
    I think it may also have to do with release timing. Leopard to Snow Leopard was 24 months and Snow Leopard to Lion was 27 months. That gave time for the 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc patch releases to stack up. Most people probably didn't upgrade until at least a few of those point releases had been out, after which they could have enjoyed almost two years before another major OS update was released. I think much of the fond memories revolve around these later versions, and there were probably plenty of people continuing to run 10.6.8 long after 10.7 was released. Now MacOS is on a yearly cycle like iOS. Stability is probably still pretty good if you wait and upgrade until about the time the new OS is announced, but Apple definitely pushes users to update sooner than that so people are spending more time running on versions that are more fresh from a major release with major changes.
    - classichasclass 8y ago
      This. Apple is really good at iterating, and nobody gets it right the first time. The early "cats" had lots of time to mature (look at how long Tiger persisted, my personal favourite) and I think Apple should strongly reconsider the annual cadence to allow that to happen again for macOS. They just changed the whole filesystem, for crying out loud. That needs time to settle. There's also the fact that Snow Leopard will run on any Intel Mac, and I think a lot of people remember how (necessarily) light on its feet it was by comparison with what followed.
      - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure they didn't develop the new file system between Sierra and High Sierra.
        classichasclass 8y ago
        Sure. But it wasn't user facing until then, and that's a big difference.
        chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        4 years internally is what I remember hearing, plus 1 year as a developer preview. So, no, certainly didn't happen overnight.
  - colechristensen 8y ago
    It was a nicer release, but all of the praise/hate for versions is a little too loud.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    Myth, huh? 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, major dev tool updates ~~~ wind leaves sails ~~~ 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 ~~~ wind returns? ~~~ 2017 10.13 High Sierra: HEVC, APFS, VR On the upside, High Sierra was a release that lives up to the old standard. Hopefully that's a trend that will continue.
    - classichasclass 8y ago
      What makes you say that High Sierra lives up to the standard? Because it had more "under the hood" stuff? I think the Snow Leopard meme is also about perceived quality, not just where the updates occurred. Also, apropos of nothing, when I was in my larval state and we walked uphill both ways to school, High Sierra was a file system, not an OS. My System 7.1 Mac has an extension to read them.
      - jjoonathan 8y ago
        Through 10.6, people had good reasons to suffer through buggy upgrades. Post 10.6, they didn't. Apple delivered bugs at the same rate but noticeably fewer heavy-hitting, impactful, and technically excellent features. The attractiveness of upgrading plummited, leading to "Why not just stick with Snow Leopard?"
    - mitchty 8y ago
      Can you explain how any of this pertains to a stability problem? Cherry picking features added to each release is... a weird argument in this regard.
  - mi100hael 8y ago
    But by the time they hit their final release of 10.6.8, it was pretty damn good. Then Lion came out with bugs left and right. You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting. And while you personally may not have had any issues (and I also haven't had any huge complaints w/ Sierra+), it's not like they haven't had their fair share of badly embarrassing bugs: - https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/10/macos-high-sierra-app-store-password-bug/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/10/macos-high-sierra-app-s... - http://fortune.com/2017/11/28/apple-security-flaw-vulnerability-bug-mac-high-sierra-root-password/ http://fortune.com/2017/11/28/apple-security-flaw-vulnerabil... - https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/macos-high-sierra-plain-text-external-apfs-disk-utility/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/macos-high-sierra-plain-text-...
    - mitchty 8y ago
      > You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting. I don't recall where I omitted anything in my original post or compared 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, care to explain? And I'm not discounting that bugs exist, just that in my experience I've not hit any huge ones. And snow leopard also had its share of badly embarrassing bugs.
      - mi100hael 8y ago
        As mentioned in TFA, the home directory bug was fixed in 10.6.2. What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8?
        mitchty 8y ago
        > What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8? Hell if I know, the goal posts seem to be shifting into me having to explain every point release now. Thanks for the discussion but its back to work for me.
        mi100hael 8y ago
        As I mentioned in my first reply, that's the final release of 10.6. Your first comment mentioned bugs that had already been patched long before the final release, which is what everyone is referring to when looking back fondly at Snow Leopard.
  - whywhywhywhy 8y ago
    Thing is, it's not about one or two large stand out bugs affecting a few. SL of course had bugs, all software has bugs. But Lion and the next few versions after that had constant small issues, instabilities and glitches that became a background noise that made the entire period of using versions 10.7-10.9 frustrating.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    I remember that bug, fun times. Of course, I think it wasn't just limited to Guest accounts (which nobody needs - get your own damn machine), which made it all the more insidious.
  - h1d 8y ago
    Question is more like, has Apple ever made a OS without adding/breaking stuff but just made the predecessor better after Snow Leopard? I think I can still feel at home using Snow Leopard as nothing significant has changed from users perspective.
- FreakyT 8y ago
  I specifically remember Snow Leopard doing one thing in particular wrong: it totally screwed up exposé. They removed the dynamic window positioning/sizing[1] and replaced it with a weird grid based system[2] that poorly utilized screen space and felt like the terrible Linux exposé ripoffs at the time. For whatever its faults, Lion did fix this[3], so I was largely happy with it. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-mt/HT201741 https://support.apple.com/en-mt/HT201741 [2] https://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-snow-leopard-for-mac https://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on... [3] https://www.cultofmac.com/94997/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-a-guided-tour-mission-control/ https://www.cultofmac.com/94997/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-a-guided-...
  - taneq 8y ago
    Expose wasn't meant to look like that? Huh.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    I never got the point of F11 moving all windows so you could see the desktop. At that point, you probably have too many on the screen and would benefit from a second monitor. Despite this, I actually really liked Dock expose and minimizing windows into the icon a la Windows.
taneq 8y ago
The only Mac I ever owned was a Snow Leopard laptop. One by one the others in my team got Lion and Mountain Lion laptops, and I had to sit through their cursing every day while my battered old silver brick kept soldiering on. I think these days the battery is pretty well dead and the hard drive is on the way out but everything else is as solid as the day I bought it, albeit more covered in iron ore dust from the many mine sites I took it to.
wintorez 8y ago
Somewhat unrelated to the article, but one thing I learned about all Apple products is this: Never upgrade their OS. Doing minor updates is fine, but any major version upgrade will doom the device.
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
  My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is quite good about OS upgrades in general.
  - rusk 8y ago
    I don't think my iPhone was ever damaged by an update - I always migrated to a newer one before the newer OSes caused strain. I was one of those who held off on the initial releases of iOS 7 .. But my god Yosemite in 2015 (again waited for it to "stabilise") on my 2014 MBP was an unholy shitshow.
- mryingster 8y ago
  My current OS actually stems back from the Public Beta that I ran on my G3. I've cloned the data from HDD to HDD/Computer to Computer and upgraded the OS every time, and it's currently on El Capitan (because my Mac Pro is no longer supported). I've never run into issues during an upgrade.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    You surely must have done the "transfer my settings and apps" on the PPC->Intel transition. I can't imagine the HDD clone method working through the architecture change. Still, I'm impressed that settings haven't borked anything since then. There have to be a lot of stale plist values that aren't used any more, I'd guess.
    - mryingster 8y ago
      Oh, I'm sure. I've used the migration tool when going from one mac to another (Specifically from G4 to Intel iMac in 2006) which might clean some things out. Looking at the plists in my ~/Libray, I have some dated as far back as 2001. I also still have my MacOS 9 installed on my main hard disk :-P
ken 8y ago
This is an excellent clickbait headline because the word "myth" in modern language has two distinct meanings (a popular belief; a falsehood). The article is about the earlier meaning (e.g., "the legend of Snow Leopard has steadily grown, its mythology spreading"), while people assume it's about the latter and get riled up. (One HN comment here even uses the word in both senses in adjacent sentences!) It is a myth (well, as much as a computer operating system can be), but that doesn't mean it's not true.
- rusk 8y ago
  A myth typically refers to a popular belief unsubstantiated by fact.
  - swebs 8y ago
    Try reading his post again.
    - rusk 8y ago
      What do you mean? He says it's either/or. I'm saying it's both.
      - swebs 8y ago
        The main point was that the term can be ambiguous and it's not always both. The word "myth" is sometimes used synonymously with "creation story" or sometimes with "lie". https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth
        rusk 8y ago
        and with regards to parent comment your point is what exactly?
peatmoss 8y ago
The first version of OS X I ran was the beta that didn’t look much like the UI we know today. In those days I was a NetBSD user. The first public release of OS X was mana from heaven for me. I think the addition of Expose (Panther?) was the high point for me in terms of OS X releases. The addition of Spotlight shortly thereafter marked the beginning of features that I started disabling either partially or wholly. Now I’m not entirely comfortable running macOS as a daily driver simply because I know heaps of crap is turned on that I probably don’t want, and don't have the time or inclination to research the likely security implications. We crossed a point a few years ago where I rediscovered free *nixen, and decided that it was easier to make Xubuntu do what I want than it was to make macOS not do what I didn’t want. I miss simple OS X.
projectramo 8y ago
This article doesn't say how it did, but that it did. However, this is still an interesting piece of history. I didn't realize anyone considered any particular MacOS better than the others. I've had several macs since 2012, and I always upgrade. Haven't experienced any particular issues I can remember. So this whole thing was missed by me although apparently it was a big event for other people.
- totoglazer 8y ago
  2012 was already into the decline years. Snow Leopard came out in 2009 and was replaced with Lion, in 2011.
mattkevan 8y ago
I've used OS X since the very first betas. Every release has had its bugs, but every release has been an improvement too. I don't get the praise/hate online for different releases, or the narrative that Apple's software quality is turning to crap. It's too shrill to be genuine. Are there still annoyances or things that could be better in macOS? Of course. Is it better than the alternatives or than it used to be? Yes. I also don't get why you wouldn't want to upgrade to the latest version. At least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the middle of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could mention. Having said that, the initial release of 10.5 Leopard was known as Leper amongst my friends due to its general tendency to fall over all the time...
- ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  I think a lot of it is people are just adverse to change.
  - rusk 8y ago
    https://medium.com/@cwodtke/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate-you-461772fbcac7 https://medium.com/@cwodtke/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate...
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  I think there are two dynamics operating in tandem to create the oft-voice antipathy toward macOS in these parts. They are: 1. People perceive the past through rose tinted glasses, so they remember past releases as being better than they actually were. 2. People notice the things which are going wrong more than they notice the things that are going right, so they think current releases are worse than they actually are.
  - fhood 8y ago
    I just miss the days when they named the OS releases after kitty cats. Snow leopards are adorable, but I don't feel nearly as much passion for a beach I've never been to.
Wildgoose 8y ago
I loved Snow Leopard. It's been downhill ever since, and I did hear that Apple has been moving their MacOS development teams to work on iOS instead. I'm afraid it shows - I've just bought a new Windows machine, my first this century.
- fhood 8y ago
  As a user of the latest versions of both macOS and Windows, I'll still take macOS any day. At the moment it is their hardware I am frustrated with, not their software.
  - h1d 8y ago
    After using macOS as main OS around Tiger, using Windows today is nothing but a source of frustration including third party apps with million options and menu items.
Torai 8y ago
With marketing, cultism and people who has to somehow auto convince themselves and others about the reasons they have to pay more for the same thing PC owners have? Are companies/people using Windows or Linux feeling less reliability? And more importantly, do they get to do work faster or not?
tehabe 8y ago
There is only one issue I'm having with macOS or Mac OS X today, they still use 10.x and they had three wonderful possibilities to switch to 11: Lion: Darwin 11. (Also leaving behind PowerPC) El Capitan: Simply remove the 10. High Sierra: Sync with iOS 11. But Apple didn't do it. On a serious note: The other thing I really disliked was FileVault 1, which based on a sparse image file and was an horror to backup. And in Panther it was at first extremely unreliable. I think I lost some data back then. FV2 based on CoreStorage was much, much better. Which came with Lion btw.
mbesto 8y ago
Is there any other release that gave users back as much hard disk space as SL? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/
kradeelav 8y ago
Can confirm, my 2010 Snow Leopard is still my main workhorse despite being used every day with demanding design programs, and replacing the battery / RAM once (and being dropped several times, imagine that). At this point I'm honestly not sure what I'll replace it with - hoping to extend its lifespan for at least another 5 years which is ironically looking possible.
gargravarr 8y ago
Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly usable. Of course, it had bugs - no OS is perfect. But Apple made a wise decision. Leopard was a runaway success - the gorgeous UI with metal accents and its deep purple default background, well-established workflows and other aspects - and Apple just refined it, making it pure x86-64 (it performed much better on my MBP than Leopard with its lingering PPC support) and embracing open technologies (OpenGL and OpenCL especially) to increase performance, but leaving the UI alone. Every release since has been trying to 'modernise' the UI, with extremely varied success. I recently got a Retina MBP and installed Sierra on it, and I use none of the new UI features. In fact, there are times I miss simple things like the 'lozenge' to switch a Disk Image window into a full Finder window. I hate the washed out, low-contrast, flattened look of the current OS. It staggers me that, in an era where we have a glut of processing performance on tap, the UI has less 3D elements than 10 years ago when you needed dedicated GPUs. There's no eye candy or anything that would make you step back and appreciate the thought and design that went into the interface; it all just blends together. Sure, it's not distracting, but I like clearly defined buttons that tell me where I can click. I like the UI to do exactly what it's told and not try to get me to change my ways (Siri, Launchpad etc.). And what the HELL is this obsession with Dark Mode?! I have seen zero useful reasons to upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave. The feature lists are wearing thin. Apple have long since run out of ideas for the OS on its own, but it seems they've also run out of ideas to copy from iOS, so their current approach is to make some superficial UI tweaks and call it a new OS. Maybe making the OS chargeable again would help - I actually bought Snow Leopard (still have the DVD at home, used it this year to build a VM!) and it's one of the most satisfying pieces of software I've handed over money for. Maybe the total loss of revenue from the OS division has sucked the motivation right out of them.
cjensen 8y ago
For me Snow Leopard was significantly more buggy than Leopard. The lesson here, if there is one: in sufficiently complicated software, every release is worse for someone.
kimdotcom 8y ago
10.6.8!!!
rleigh 8y ago
Try this out: Take any current MacOS release, any recent one you like. Now, look at the versions of all the core tools. Stuff like readlink(1). Basic UNIX tools. Look at the manual page, and note the dates. This is the date of the tool it was last synced from FreeBSD. Spoiler: 10.6 is the last release anything significant in the base system was updated. It's been left to stagnate ever since. For anyone relying on MacOS as a UNIX system for development, testing or heaven forbid, deployment, this release marked the end of any serious maintenance work and the divergence of MacOS X from the mainstream. It's now a decade out of date. That's not to say no development has taken place. There's a lot gone on at a higher level. But the base system is so outdated it's now presenting real compatibility problems. Scripts which work on Linux and the BSDs may no longer work on MacOS: it's missing a decade of improvements, options, and bugfixes we all take for granted. The complete lack of care here is beyond ridicule. Surely a company like Apple could hire one person to take care of this. It's not like routine maintenance is particularly onerous.
- h1d 8y ago
  Current Apple is sitting on the quality of the past. I wonder when they'll consume it all.
  - Khaine 8y ago
    They are shitting on the quality of the past. They are running on brand recognition, at least in the Computer space. iPhones are still amazing.
    - h1d 8y ago
      They reached to that amazing state around iPhone 5 when competitors were years behind. Not sure why the world is not on a riot with that weird pack of icons since iOS 7 but yeah, they're still good, just not much better on each releases.
- tehabe 8y ago
  Apple also removed Samba from macOS for the same reason it didn't update bash or readline in ages: the GPLv3.

71 points by rusk 8y ago

Anyone who has used every version of OSX will tell you it's not a myth. Although I agree it is mostly remembered because Lion was such an awful release and objectively a step backwards that took a good few more releases to finally recover from.

mitchty 8y ago
Hi, user of OS X from 10.2 to present. It’s a myth. Snow leopard was not some mythical stable release without bugs. Hell it had the remove your home directory bug when logging in as a guest. I’ve personally had no real problems with the recent releases, I know a fair amount of people inmy camp too. Angry people are just more vocal. I know there are a ton of hn posters that will disagree but this whole thing is like windows 2000 being the most stable release of windows. Or more recently windows 7.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  >angry people are more vocal That is a big thing. Kinda like this mac book pro is fine as long as you don’t get a bad keyboard.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    The 15" one I had at my previous job had graphics corruption issues (just big red — presumably untextured — rectangles all over the place), and I have to restart my current 13" one at my current job every couple of days because one of the thunderbolt ports will give up on outputting video on a regular basis (and won't recover until I restart). I also lose audio on this one every few days. I'll accept a dud as unlucky. Two in a row feels sloppy. The keyboard is only one of many problems these laptops have.
    - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      An 8600M GT killed my '07 15" and I've sworn off discrete graphics ever since.
      - peatmoss 8y ago
        While the long-term plan for Apple appears to be to move everything to their own silicon, I wonder if we'll see a hardware refresh based on a 7nm AMD Ryzen chip between now and then. The integrated graphics on AMD seem to be relatively performant compared to Intel's, and I can't imagine AMD not having pretty good power characteristics at 7nm.
        chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        Maybe this is 2005 Me talking, but I simply don't trust AMD to do anything well. To be fair, both Intel and them have had high profile failures where the product either didn't work at all or didn't perform adequately (Itanium and Bulldozer). The AMD I remember also had a tendency to over estimate performance and underclock parts, (1800+, anyone?) even if they could sell them for less. It's this part that makes me think Apple wouldn't want to deal with them. For all of Intel's missteps, Apple choosing AMD because they are the cheaper alternative smells weird to me.
- Angostura 8y ago
  Lion, however was a slow, buggy resource hog that bought older Macs to their knees. 10.6.8 was, by comparison fantastic. Mountain Lion started fixing the damage.
- stetrain 8y ago
  I think it may also have to do with release timing. Leopard to Snow Leopard was 24 months and Snow Leopard to Lion was 27 months. That gave time for the 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc patch releases to stack up. Most people probably didn't upgrade until at least a few of those point releases had been out, after which they could have enjoyed almost two years before another major OS update was released. I think much of the fond memories revolve around these later versions, and there were probably plenty of people continuing to run 10.6.8 long after 10.7 was released. Now MacOS is on a yearly cycle like iOS. Stability is probably still pretty good if you wait and upgrade until about the time the new OS is announced, but Apple definitely pushes users to update sooner than that so people are spending more time running on versions that are more fresh from a major release with major changes.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    This. Apple is really good at iterating, and nobody gets it right the first time. The early "cats" had lots of time to mature (look at how long Tiger persisted, my personal favourite) and I think Apple should strongly reconsider the annual cadence to allow that to happen again for macOS. They just changed the whole filesystem, for crying out loud. That needs time to settle. There's also the fact that Snow Leopard will run on any Intel Mac, and I think a lot of people remember how (necessarily) light on its feet it was by comparison with what followed.
    - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure they didn't develop the new file system between Sierra and High Sierra.
      - classichasclass 8y ago
        Sure. But it wasn't user facing until then, and that's a big difference.
      - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        4 years internally is what I remember hearing, plus 1 year as a developer preview. So, no, certainly didn't happen overnight.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  It was a nicer release, but all of the praise/hate for versions is a little too loud.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  Myth, huh? 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, major dev tool updates ~~~ wind leaves sails ~~~ 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 ~~~ wind returns? ~~~ 2017 10.13 High Sierra: HEVC, APFS, VR On the upside, High Sierra was a release that lives up to the old standard. Hopefully that's a trend that will continue.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    What makes you say that High Sierra lives up to the standard? Because it had more "under the hood" stuff? I think the Snow Leopard meme is also about perceived quality, not just where the updates occurred. Also, apropos of nothing, when I was in my larval state and we walked uphill both ways to school, High Sierra was a file system, not an OS. My System 7.1 Mac has an extension to read them.
    - jjoonathan 8y ago
      Through 10.6, people had good reasons to suffer through buggy upgrades. Post 10.6, they didn't. Apple delivered bugs at the same rate but noticeably fewer heavy-hitting, impactful, and technically excellent features. The attractiveness of upgrading plummited, leading to "Why not just stick with Snow Leopard?"
  - mitchty 8y ago
    Can you explain how any of this pertains to a stability problem? Cherry picking features added to each release is... a weird argument in this regard.
- mi100hael 8y ago
  But by the time they hit their final release of 10.6.8, it was pretty damn good. Then Lion came out with bugs left and right. You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting. And while you personally may not have had any issues (and I also haven't had any huge complaints w/ Sierra+), it's not like they haven't had their fair share of badly embarrassing bugs: - https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/10/macos-high-sierra-app-store-password-bug/ https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/10/macos-high-sierra-app-s... - http://fortune.com/2017/11/28/apple-security-flaw-vulnerability-bug-mac-high-sierra-root-password/ http://fortune.com/2017/11/28/apple-security-flaw-vulnerabil... - https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/macos-high-sierra-plain-text-external-apfs-disk-utility/ https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/macos-high-sierra-plain-text-...
  - mitchty 8y ago
    > You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting. I don't recall where I omitted anything in my original post or compared 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, care to explain? And I'm not discounting that bugs exist, just that in my experience I've not hit any huge ones. And snow leopard also had its share of badly embarrassing bugs.
    - mi100hael 8y ago
      As mentioned in TFA, the home directory bug was fixed in 10.6.2. What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8?
      - mitchty 8y ago
        > What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8? Hell if I know, the goal posts seem to be shifting into me having to explain every point release now. Thanks for the discussion but its back to work for me.
        mi100hael 8y ago
        As I mentioned in my first reply, that's the final release of 10.6. Your first comment mentioned bugs that had already been patched long before the final release, which is what everyone is referring to when looking back fondly at Snow Leopard.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago
  Thing is, it's not about one or two large stand out bugs affecting a few. SL of course had bugs, all software has bugs. But Lion and the next few versions after that had constant small issues, instabilities and glitches that became a background noise that made the entire period of using versions 10.7-10.9 frustrating.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  I remember that bug, fun times. Of course, I think it wasn't just limited to Guest accounts (which nobody needs - get your own damn machine), which made it all the more insidious.
- h1d 8y ago
  Question is more like, has Apple ever made a OS without adding/breaking stuff but just made the predecessor better after Snow Leopard? I think I can still feel at home using Snow Leopard as nothing significant has changed from users perspective.
FreakyT 8y ago
I specifically remember Snow Leopard doing one thing in particular wrong: it totally screwed up exposé. They removed the dynamic window positioning/sizing[1] and replaced it with a weird grid based system[2] that poorly utilized screen space and felt like the terrible Linux exposé ripoffs at the time. For whatever its faults, Lion did fix this[3], so I was largely happy with it. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-mt/HT201741 https://support.apple.com/en-mt/HT201741 [2] https://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on-snow-leopard-for-mac https://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on... [3] https://www.cultofmac.com/94997/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-a-guided-tour-mission-control/ https://www.cultofmac.com/94997/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-a-guided-...
- taneq 8y ago
  Expose wasn't meant to look like that? Huh.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  I never got the point of F11 moving all windows so you could see the desktop. At that point, you probably have too many on the screen and would benefit from a second monitor. Despite this, I actually really liked Dock expose and minimizing windows into the icon a la Windows.

taneq 8y ago

The only Mac I ever owned was a Snow Leopard laptop. One by one the others in my team got Lion and Mountain Lion laptops, and I had to sit through their cursing every day while my battered old silver brick kept soldiering on. I think these days the battery is pretty well dead and the hard drive is on the way out but everything else is as solid as the day I bought it, albeit more covered in iron ore dust from the many mine sites I took it to.

wintorez 8y ago

Somewhat unrelated to the article, but one thing I learned about all Apple products is this: Never upgrade their OS. Doing minor updates is fine, but any major version upgrade will doom the device.

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is quite good about OS upgrades in general.
- rusk 8y ago
  I don't think my iPhone was ever damaged by an update - I always migrated to a newer one before the newer OSes caused strain. I was one of those who held off on the initial releases of iOS 7 .. But my god Yosemite in 2015 (again waited for it to "stabilise") on my 2014 MBP was an unholy shitshow.
mryingster 8y ago
My current OS actually stems back from the Public Beta that I ran on my G3. I've cloned the data from HDD to HDD/Computer to Computer and upgraded the OS every time, and it's currently on El Capitan (because my Mac Pro is no longer supported). I've never run into issues during an upgrade.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  You surely must have done the "transfer my settings and apps" on the PPC->Intel transition. I can't imagine the HDD clone method working through the architecture change. Still, I'm impressed that settings haven't borked anything since then. There have to be a lot of stale plist values that aren't used any more, I'd guess.
  - mryingster 8y ago
    Oh, I'm sure. I've used the migration tool when going from one mac to another (Specifically from G4 to Intel iMac in 2006) which might clean some things out. Looking at the plists in my ~/Libray, I have some dated as far back as 2001. I also still have my MacOS 9 installed on my main hard disk :-P

ken 8y ago

This is an excellent clickbait headline because the word "myth" in modern language has two distinct meanings (a popular belief; a falsehood). The article is about the earlier meaning (e.g., "the legend of Snow Leopard has steadily grown, its mythology spreading"), while people assume it's about the latter and get riled up. (One HN comment here even uses the word in both senses in adjacent sentences!) It is a myth (well, as much as a computer operating system can be), but that doesn't mean it's not true.

rusk 8y ago
A myth typically refers to a popular belief unsubstantiated by fact.
- swebs 8y ago
  Try reading his post again.
  - rusk 8y ago
    What do you mean? He says it's either/or. I'm saying it's both.
    - swebs 8y ago
      The main point was that the term can be ambiguous and it's not always both. The word "myth" is sometimes used synonymously with "creation story" or sometimes with "lie". https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth
      - rusk 8y ago
        and with regards to parent comment your point is what exactly?

peatmoss 8y ago

The first version of OS X I ran was the beta that didn’t look much like the UI we know today. In those days I was a NetBSD user. The first public release of OS X was mana from heaven for me. I think the addition of Expose (Panther?) was the high point for me in terms of OS X releases. The addition of Spotlight shortly thereafter marked the beginning of features that I started disabling either partially or wholly. Now I’m not entirely comfortable running macOS as a daily driver simply because I know heaps of crap is turned on that I probably don’t want, and don't have the time or inclination to research the likely security implications. We crossed a point a few years ago where I rediscovered free *nixen, and decided that it was easier to make Xubuntu do what I want than it was to make macOS not do what I didn’t want. I miss simple OS X.

projectramo 8y ago

This article doesn't say how it did, but that it did. However, this is still an interesting piece of history. I didn't realize anyone considered any particular MacOS better than the others. I've had several macs since 2012, and I always upgrade. Haven't experienced any particular issues I can remember. So this whole thing was missed by me although apparently it was a big event for other people.

totoglazer 8y ago
2012 was already into the decline years. Snow Leopard came out in 2009 and was replaced with Lion, in 2011.

mattkevan 8y ago

I've used OS X since the very first betas. Every release has had its bugs, but every release has been an improvement too. I don't get the praise/hate online for different releases, or the narrative that Apple's software quality is turning to crap. It's too shrill to be genuine. Are there still annoyances or things that could be better in macOS? Of course. Is it better than the alternatives or than it used to be? Yes. I also don't get why you wouldn't want to upgrade to the latest version. At least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the middle of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could mention. Having said that, the initial release of 10.5 Leopard was known as Leper amongst my friends due to its general tendency to fall over all the time...

ganoushoreilly 8y ago
I think a lot of it is people are just adverse to change.
- rusk 8y ago
  https://medium.com/@cwodtke/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate-you-461772fbcac7 https://medium.com/@cwodtke/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate...
toasterlovin 8y ago
I think there are two dynamics operating in tandem to create the oft-voice antipathy toward macOS in these parts. They are: 1. People perceive the past through rose tinted glasses, so they remember past releases as being better than they actually were. 2. People notice the things which are going wrong more than they notice the things that are going right, so they think current releases are worse than they actually are.
- fhood 8y ago
  I just miss the days when they named the OS releases after kitty cats. Snow leopards are adorable, but I don't feel nearly as much passion for a beach I've never been to.

Wildgoose 8y ago

I loved Snow Leopard. It's been downhill ever since, and I did hear that Apple has been moving their MacOS development teams to work on iOS instead. I'm afraid it shows - I've just bought a new Windows machine, my first this century.

fhood 8y ago
As a user of the latest versions of both macOS and Windows, I'll still take macOS any day. At the moment it is their hardware I am frustrated with, not their software.
- h1d 8y ago
  After using macOS as main OS around Tiger, using Windows today is nothing but a source of frustration including third party apps with million options and menu items.

Torai 8y ago

With marketing, cultism and people who has to somehow auto convince themselves and others about the reasons they have to pay more for the same thing PC owners have? Are companies/people using Windows or Linux feeling less reliability? And more importantly, do they get to do work faster or not?

tehabe 8y ago

There is only one issue I'm having with macOS or Mac OS X today, they still use 10.x and they had three wonderful possibilities to switch to 11: Lion: Darwin 11. (Also leaving behind PowerPC) El Capitan: Simply remove the 10. High Sierra: Sync with iOS 11. But Apple didn't do it. On a serious note: The other thing I really disliked was FileVault 1, which based on a sparse image file and was an horror to backup. And in Panther it was at first extremely unreliable. I think I lost some data back then. FV2 based on CoreStorage was much, much better. Which came with Lion btw.

mbesto 8y ago

Is there any other release that gave users back as much hard disk space as SL? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/

kradeelav 8y ago

Can confirm, my 2010 Snow Leopard is still my main workhorse despite being used every day with demanding design programs, and replacing the battery / RAM once (and being dropped several times, imagine that). At this point I'm honestly not sure what I'll replace it with - hoping to extend its lifespan for at least another 5 years which is ironically looking possible.

gargravarr 8y ago

Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly usable. Of course, it had bugs - no OS is perfect. But Apple made a wise decision. Leopard was a runaway success - the gorgeous UI with metal accents and its deep purple default background, well-established workflows and other aspects - and Apple just refined it, making it pure x86-64 (it performed much better on my MBP than Leopard with its lingering PPC support) and embracing open technologies (OpenGL and OpenCL especially) to increase performance, but leaving the UI alone. Every release since has been trying to 'modernise' the UI, with extremely varied success. I recently got a Retina MBP and installed Sierra on it, and I use none of the new UI features. In fact, there are times I miss simple things like the 'lozenge' to switch a Disk Image window into a full Finder window. I hate the washed out, low-contrast, flattened look of the current OS. It staggers me that, in an era where we have a glut of processing performance on tap, the UI has less 3D elements than 10 years ago when you needed dedicated GPUs. There's no eye candy or anything that would make you step back and appreciate the thought and design that went into the interface; it all just blends together. Sure, it's not distracting, but I like clearly defined buttons that tell me where I can click. I like the UI to do exactly what it's told and not try to get me to change my ways (Siri, Launchpad etc.). And what the HELL is this obsession with Dark Mode?! I have seen zero useful reasons to upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave. The feature lists are wearing thin. Apple have long since run out of ideas for the OS on its own, but it seems they've also run out of ideas to copy from iOS, so their current approach is to make some superficial UI tweaks and call it a new OS. Maybe making the OS chargeable again would help - I actually bought Snow Leopard (still have the DVD at home, used it this year to build a VM!) and it's one of the most satisfying pieces of software I've handed over money for. Maybe the total loss of revenue from the OS division has sucked the motivation right out of them.

cjensen 8y ago

For me Snow Leopard was significantly more buggy than Leopard. The lesson here, if there is one: in sufficiently complicated software, every release is worse for someone.

kimdotcom 8y ago

10.6.8!!!

rleigh 8y ago

Try this out: Take any current MacOS release, any recent one you like. Now, look at the versions of all the core tools. Stuff like readlink(1). Basic UNIX tools. Look at the manual page, and note the dates. This is the date of the tool it was last synced from FreeBSD. Spoiler: 10.6 is the last release anything significant in the base system was updated. It's been left to stagnate ever since. For anyone relying on MacOS as a UNIX system for development, testing or heaven forbid, deployment, this release marked the end of any serious maintenance work and the divergence of MacOS X from the mainstream. It's now a decade out of date. That's not to say no development has taken place. There's a lot gone on at a higher level. But the base system is so outdated it's now presenting real compatibility problems. Scripts which work on Linux and the BSDs may no longer work on MacOS: it's missing a decade of improvements, options, and bugfixes we all take for granted. The complete lack of care here is beyond ridicule. Surely a company like Apple could hire one person to take care of this. It's not like routine maintenance is particularly onerous.

h1d 8y ago
Current Apple is sitting on the quality of the past. I wonder when they'll consume it all.
- Khaine 8y ago
  They are shitting on the quality of the past. They are running on brand recognition, at least in the Computer space. iPhones are still amazing.
  - h1d 8y ago
    They reached to that amazing state around iPhone 5 when competitors were years behind. Not sure why the world is not on a riot with that weird pack of icons since iOS 7 but yeah, they're still good, just not much better on each releases.
tehabe 8y ago
Apple also removed Samba from macOS for the same reason it didn't update bash or readline in ages: the GPLv3.