Framing Snow Leopard as a "bugfix release" didn't happen for enlightened reasons, it happened because they cannibalized the Mac OS team and sent everyone to wor

Framing Snow Leopard as a "bugfix release" didn't happen for enlightened reasons, it happened because they cannibalized the Mac OS team and sent everyone to work on iPhone. The skeleton crew left behind lost the capacity to do anything but bugfixes. This is why Snow Leopard was so buggy on release but unlike previous releases actually did get better: management stopped pushing new features, and even a skeleton crew was able to polish it over time. If you look at a map of tentpole Mac OS features, you can see that the ambition vanished with the iPhone's release and didn't recover for a decade.