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It's interesting to me how widely followed the "Snow Leopard" myth is. It was a total disaster of a release. There were egregious issues in libdispatch which le
by gok 7y ago
It's interesting to me how widely followed the "Snow Leopard" myth is. It was a total disaster of a release. There were egregious issues in libdispatch which led to the entire API being re-written at least once. There were also random hangs due to major kernel scheduler changes for the first several point releases. Snow Leopard also introduced OpenCL, which has basically never worked. The Finder re-write added no features but made it slower. The 64-bit kernel couldn't be turned on by default for years. Many of the perf gains came from dropping PowerPC support by default with only a couple years of warning, which I'm sure today would cause an uproar.
It got marketed as a "no features" release and that's how it seems to be remembered. But in fact it probably was probably the highest-risk Mac OS release ever. It rewrote a huge amount of code for almost no direct user benefit, at time when testing was quite limited.
- madeofpalk 7y agoOr what about that Snow Leopard bug where your main user account got deleted whenever you used the Guest account https://www.computerworld.com/article/2528936/snow-leopard-bug-deletes-all-user-data.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2528936/snow-leopard-b...
- snowwrestler 7y agoSnow Leopard was marketed as a stability release, but what they didn't tell us was that the stability would come at the end of the dev cycle, not at launch. :-) In the end, Snow Leopard did end up very stable. I'm stilling running it today on an old Mac Mini hooked up to some old peripherals I want to keep around. But it definitely did not start that way.
- lukifer 7y agoPeople remember what Snow Leopard became, not what it was at launch. It's also contrasted in memory with the bold, controversial, iOS-influenced reimagining of Lion, leaving behind an inevitable nostalgia for the stable simplicity of the previous release.