18 ms·

The myth of Snow Leopard

132 points by speckx 3mo ago

mymacbook 3mo ago
I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogfood while we made our own mistakes on iOS. As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated.
- pico303 3mo ago
  There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism. Snow Leopard was a great experience for me. So much more stable, and the OS felt tighter, like lots of the little wonky things got sorted out. It well deserves its credit and more operating systems should focus on bug fix releases once in a while.
  - ndiddy 3mo ago
    FreeBSD is not a GPL OS either.
  - mepian 3mo ago
    FreeBSD is definitely not a "GPL OS", the license is right in the name!
    - ido 3mo ago
      To be pedantic “BSD” is the name of the original distribution that FreeBSD is based on, and the license is also named after it (rather than FreeBSD being named after the license).
    - frollogaston 3mo ago
      Guess he meant non-free OS. I still don't get the point though, cause someone who cares so much about FOSS wouldn't be criticizing SL vs Leopard, he'd just not use Mac OS.
  - vor_ 3mo ago
    I'd say Snow Leopard was as buggy as any other typical OS X release from that era, as covered by the Jeff Johnson article. The reality is that the "no new features" marketing was most likely a positive spin on the shift in engineering resources toward iOS, which had previously caused Leopard's release to be delayed.
  - anthk 3mo ago
    FreeBSD is not GPL and in that era FreeBSD was almot the low-level Mac OS X testground for ex-FreeBSD developers working for Apple.
- ndiddy 3mo ago
  > I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point releases of Snow Leopard as a high point for stability because of the years of bug fixes that had gone into the system by then. > As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. I don't know anybody who's switched to Mac because of a feature they added in the latest OS release. It's always because of the better price-performance, the better battery life, or because Windows got too glitchy and annoying. The only new Mac OS feature from the past few years that I can even name off the top of my head is when they finally added window snapping with Sequoia.
  - trueno 3mo ago
    mayhaps we've just moved the goal post on what constitutes a major release a lil too far. redefine what is major, scale that back and ship in a year cycle and not necessarily need to ship anything that pushes you past the threshold of "we're still beta testing even after release, and now the users are the QA team". just bring that definition of "a major software upgrade" back a bit. everyone should do it, i'd be super happy if "major upgrade" meant a new icon set and some exciting thoroughly vetted new utilities/apps. thrilled even.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop.
    - alsetmusic 3mo ago
      > When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop. It's one of the first things I turn off.
    - 3mo ago
- lapcat 3mo ago
  > I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I'm not sure this is a good place to debate my article when the author of the submitted article merely linked to mine. It appears that Ruben Schade downgraded to 10.5 from 10.6.2, which was still pretty early in the Snow Leopard cycle, then "tried it again a few months later" and downgraded again, until 10.7 Lion (which I personally hated and skipped on my main Mac). Thus, Schade never experienced the later versions of Snow Leopard that everyone remembers fondly.
  - thomassmith65 3mo ago
    I just reread the blogpost (by the parent) that this article cites, and its points all seem correct to me, including that "Mac OS X 10.6.0 was certainly much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8": • 10.6 was not primarily about bug fixes • 10.7 was buggy and its design was incoherent • Apple should abandon its yearly release cycle That said, my recollections from the time are that the 10.6 GM release caused fewer problems than the 10.5 GM. It wouldn't surprise me if the consensus about Snow Leopard switches to the opinion that Snow Leopard was no better than any other version. That's wrong, but few people still use or remember using Snow Leopard.
  - masswerk 3mo ago
    Yes, the version of Snow Leopard people are referring to (and have fond memories of, me included) was 10.6.8.x. The point is really that it was given time to mature. (Back in the day, users used to explicitly refer to "10.8.6", and not just globally to "Snow Leopard". Similar to how people used to refer to 7.5.5 and 7.6.2 specifically.)
- musicale 3mo ago
  > When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated What about the recent macOS releases that seem to prioritize dubious features (Apple Intelligence) that don't add a lot of value (and don't work well), while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass (not to mention the broken window resize region, inconsistent spacing and corner radii, menu items being hidden under the notch, the off-center Windows menu, scrollbars that are either invisible or hard to target, etc.) Liquid Glass was inexcusable as it opposed the fundamental UI principles of clarity and legibility. Apple basically ignored its own design principles.
  - alsetmusic 3mo ago
    > while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass This is why Apple nerds (like me) are hopeful that John Ternus will refocus the company. Steve said that companies that want to make good software should make their own hardware. I only learned that Alan Kay said that first when looking to make sure that I had this quote correct. Alan Dye is gone. The guy who was completely unqualified to lead UI design is no longer in charge. Tim Cook will soon move to a new role. The business guy is stepping aside. An actual engineer with no business degree is gonna be in charge. Maybe things will become sane again. I hope so. Fwiw, Apple nerds who care about UI design would enjoy the recent Talk Show episode (Daring Fireball, John Gruber, the Markdown guy) ep with Louie Mantia. He's a designer who expresses why Dye was unfit for the job in a satisfying way. Just woke, probably typos and mistakes.
- alberth 3mo ago
  > As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service When companies use to charge for OS … and the releases were staggered by 3-4 years, I would have agreed. But when OS upgrades are free, and happen yearly - there’s a different user expectation.
  - panta 3mo ago
    I'd gladly pay for the OS if this guaranteed abstaining from unnecessary changes and/or from removing useful features (eg 2d Spaces in Leopard and Snow Leopard, replaced by the inferior abomination that is Mission Control)
- steveBK123 3mo ago
  > don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable. Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things". I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I don't need the design language of the windows changed annually. I don't need the icons of all my apps to change annually. An OS is a tool that serves the purpose of granting me access to all my other tools (apps).
  - spunker540 3mo ago
    I agree- I also dont think OS features of the kind that get shipped in these updates are convincing anyone to switch from pc to mac or upgrade their mac sooner. Tons of stuff just changing for the sake of change. Meanwhile LLMs increasingly only need the command line to do everything.
  - dwaite 3mo ago
    One big source of both delays and bugs is the feeling that your work (which has compatibility impacting changes) _has_ to make it in the current release, because otherwise it will languish for years until the next train leaves. Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like Cocoa outline views broken for multiple years because the fix required API changes.
    - manxiemanx 3mo ago
      Understandable from a developers perspective but this is what management is for. This is a great indicator that Apple's current software management is doing a bad job. Because their job is to say no and come up with the plan that will make the software quality and one time. It's really the only thing they do that matters
- rlt 3mo ago
  > As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features Is this true of operating systems for most people? Personally I’d take macOS from 15 years ago (with security bug fixes and new hardware support, assuming modern apps still worked, but no new features) over today’s Windows any day.
- manxiemanx 3mo ago
  No one said major software updates are impossible on a yearly schedule. It's obviously possible since Apple's been doing it. What's not possible is major software updates with a normal amount of new features for a major software update at a reasonable level of quality
dlcarrier 3mo ago
Why write working software once, when you can make an entire career out of constantly refactoring a new broken mess?
Amorymeltzer 3mo ago
YMMV. I ran Snow Leopard on a couple of machines for years—bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square—and it was far and away the best OSX experience I had, and, at least in my experience, the best/smoothest/most stable until El Capitan, 10.11. And yes, maybe I'm thinking of 10.6.8, but I don't see why that's a problem. The myth part, is of course, a myth, and good marketing. Snow Leopard was super important for the OS, changing a ton: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_changed_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...>. Marketing gonna market. Regardless, I can agree with this: >People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.
- ch_sm 3mo ago
  > bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square haha that‘s a nice nostalgic image. I remember installing it on a friend’s laptop with my DVD in a café, to „fix her macbook“.
gord288 3mo ago
As I recall, there were plenty of legitimate user gripes when the very first iteration of Snow Leopard (10.6.0) was released. But by the time of the very last point-release (10.6.11?), the OS was rock-solid. It was only after all the initial bugs were ironed out, that Snow Leopard achieved the legendary status that it has enjoyed ever since. The blogger doesn’t take this factor into account.
- cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
  Mavericks played out similarly as far as I can recall. Earlier releases had issues but by the last minor update it was quite solid. 10.9 my personal “Snow Leopard”. It has most of what made the Aqua era releases good with some QoL/polish improvements. If I could patch it with non-flat scrollbars and 10.5/10.6 2D grid spaces it’d be perfect.
- kccqzy 3mo ago
  It was 10.6.8 v1.1. They didn’t want to increment the version number so they made a version number on top of a version number.
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    That number 10.6.8 is burned into my brain because I was on that release for so long.
- snowwrestler 3mo ago
  This is true, but it’s also true of many other OS X and MacOS releases over the years. You’ve definitely hit on the core of the issue with the Snow Leopard myth, though: comparing the final battle-hardened bug-patched version of an OS, to a newly released version. Seems like “Snow Leopard” always gets trotted out whenever someone is unhappy with the latest release.
  - bitwize 3mo ago
    See also: Windows XP. Upon release it was a security/stability CF. Today there are retrocomputing forums dedicated primarily to it. What they are gazing rose-coloredly back on is likely Windows XP SP3, not how the OS was upon its release.
internet2000 3mo ago
Snow Leopard wasn't significantly any better or worse than other Mac OS versions of the time. It was just around for longer, after Leopard which was also around for longer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Mac_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Mac_opera... More dot releases fixed stuff and people grew used to its quirks (which there were many). Note that the lull also lined up with the intense focus and high development pace Apple had on iOS in the early years. Ironically making the commentariat of the time ask if Apple had given up on the Mac.
giantfrog 3mo ago
I have great memories of Snow Leopard. It even gave you back a few GB of storage (IIRC) at a time when every GB really counted.
- slig 3mo ago
  Apple still sells 256gb disks, I'd say every GB still matters.
  - giantfrog 3mo ago
    Fair!
- kccqzy 3mo ago
  Yes. I was poking around all the different ways Apple was shaving storage and I found that the Leopard welcome animation (showing the word welcome in different languages in a galaxy) was stored in JPEGs, one for each frame; the Snow Leopard one was finally a video in H.264.
  - ebbi 3mo ago
    I miss those welcome videos!
- delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
  I got 30 GB back on a 256 GB hard disk drive. It was amazing.
- lurkerforawhile 3mo ago
  fond fond fond memories of Snow Leopard. I was just a kid back then, so I guess I missed the complaints that people are mentioning here, but even back then no shiny new features but an improved and refined product seemed like a good/brave idea. something I'd like to see more of.
jpurnell 3mo ago
Wasn't a lot of Snow Leopard an exercise in removing old cruft from the PowerPC architecture, and the last release to support 32-bit Intel machines? From my perspective at the time, it was really meant to set up Mac for the next decade or so, which it did brilliantly.
- skhr0680 3mo ago
  Mountain Lion dropped support for 32 bit kernel. I only know this because Apple didn’t provide a patch for first generation Mac Pro users, even though the CPUs were 64 bit and could run Mountain Lion just fine.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  That's not how I remember it. In fact, Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release, I'd say. As explained in the article, that mythology of a stable release was formed over time later on.
  - simondotau 3mo ago
    I don't know what the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are, but I think the article paints a misleading picture by leaving unstated how polished 10.5.8 wasn't. Sure 10.6.0 had some new bugs due to landing major new under-the-hood technologies, but there were no serious regressions. It was a rare major release where you could install it on day one and not end up regretting it. Of course 10.6 got better over time, and 10.6.8 was the best release of them all, and it was followed by Apple's answer to Windows Vista. But that doesn't mean 10.6.0 sucked.
mrkpdl 3mo ago
Another underlying reason snow leopard is so fondly remembered is it was the final purely Mac version of Mac OS X. Starting with lion the focus shifted to bringing iOS-like features and design to Mac OS X. And it has never been Mac first since.
sys_64738 3mo ago
The final SL point release was very stable. Still is. Lion was a horrible and nasty release which shouldn't have seen the light of day. FWIW, SL introduced several new UI elements into OS X as they needed something to show off at release. Something. Anything.
VCFundedGenYer 3mo ago
I don't agree, as someone who lived that era. Snow Leopard was the best OS X release in terms of performance, made immediately apparent by the disastrous release of 10.7 Lion and several years beyond. You have to remember that 10.5 was a bad and slow release. 10.6 cleaned that up, and gave you a lot of storage space back alongside the fixes and improvements.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  I lived that era too, and Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release. What actually happened is that engineers had been shifted over to iOS, which delayed Leopard. By the time of Snow Leopard, to put a positive spin on that lack of resources, Snow Leopard was a "no new features" release...even though it actually did receive new features as well as new bugs. There was even an infamous data loss bug involving guest accounts (https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-deletes-all-user-data-idUS698539042/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...)! But people have forgotten about that and only remember the marketing now.
  - UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
    PLEASE stop saying the same thing to every single person!
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  I remember 10.6 being good too, but wasn't 10.6's storage refund only because they dropped PPC support? Makes that part a lot less impressive.
lisper 3mo ago
Here is what I wrote about it at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster... Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.
fastball 3mo ago
I remember going from Tiger to Leopard and thinking "this is nice, I like a lot of these changes" and then going from Leopard to Snow Leopard and thinking "wow this is great". Then Lion came along and I was like "this is meh". So maybe it wasn't peak performance or reliability that caused the feeling, but there was definitely something better about SL, and the reason I know it wasn't just nostalgic rose-tinting is because it was bookended by releases I liked worse.
vor_ 3mo ago
Snow Leopard was so buggy that it had an infamous data loss bug: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-deletes-all-user-data-idUS698539042/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d... People forget these things after they get patched out and time passes. What's left behind as memories fade is a feel-good mythology about a bug fix release that never really existed. The truth was that engineering resources had been shifted to iOS, which delayed Leopard, and the "no new features" marketing was a way of justifying the lack of resources.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
  It’s annoying to read what amounts to the same reply multiple times in a thread, and needing to commit your username to memory to remember if it was you or not.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  The guest account bug was the one thing. But who still uses guest accounts in 2009?
jitl 3mo ago
Bring back grid Expose and grid virtual desktops!
- Grombobulous 3mo ago
  https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/ https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/
keeganpoppen 3mo ago
i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?
- jogu 3mo ago
  Yeah, there's a sentence about how they downgraded twice!
  - mcphage 3mo ago
    There's also the bit where none of us cold be old enough to remember it in person, and so everything we say about it is just vibes that we picked up from the internet.
jimbob45 3mo ago
Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it. Microsoft ignored everyone and said, “You fool users just don’t understand what makes a good operating system.” Snow Leopard was the next major OS release and it just worked the way people expected an OS to work. Paired with solid understated marketing, it felt like users were respected for their choices in an OS once again. MS was forced to follow suit with W7. Now, MS is back to ignoring users by forcing telemetry and AI. Too bad we don’t still have Steve Jobs to show them how it’s done.
- foobar1962 3mo ago
  > Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it. People had difficultly opening the plastic case it came in. I did. Ms added a red pull tab to indicate an affordance, then later changed the case to a simple clam shell for Windows 7.
EPWN3D 3mo ago
I'm sorry, but this is horseshit. Snow Leopard is beloved by the Mac user base for a reason. It was legitimately faster and more stable than any prior release.
LegNeato 3mo ago
Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally for us to look at and determine if it should go in an update. I packaged and audited the builds and tuned the delta vs full updates. I built the system that largely automated diffing "trains" for software updates (automastering). The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different. Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. I am not sure why people on the internet don't believe that, but I was there. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. In normal feature releases it operated bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?". AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs. The first .1 or .2 ALWAYS fixed critical bugs, because: 1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in software updates...which was developed concurrently with the end of the main release (hence why .1 came out right away) 2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested. Software updates are always needed, though the issues they fix became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices. But I can tell you FOR A FACT that Snow Leopard had fewer major bugs over its lifetime, coalesced very quickly, and was extremely solid when Lion was released.
tragiclos 3mo ago
This was my memory as well. Lion was the first version of OS X that was usable as a daily driver.
- mrkpdl 3mo ago
  For me panther (10.3) was more than adequate as a daily driver for the time. Fantastic OS.
moralestapia 3mo ago
Sorry dude, but you're a liar. Not long ago, a friend of my dad was showing me his old Macbook Pro (one of those big 17-inch aluminum ones). He never upgraded the OS and somehow Safari can still open his email and he has Word and stuff. That thing was running soooooo smoooth, zero lag, no flickering, no quirks, apps open immediately, etc. That release was peak OS X. I have an M5 Max and it doesn't feel that good. Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.
nickm12 3mo ago
I remember Snow Leopard as a particularly stable release, but it's been so long this could easily be misremembering. One other thing that was notable about Snow Leopard, though, was that it was the last release before the iOSification of the Mac. Starting with Lion, Apple increasingly tried to unify the platforms and bring ideas and designs from iOS to the Mac, with mixed success. For myself Snow Leopard holds a special place as the last "pure Mac" release and a culmination of a decade of Mac OS X releases. I skipped over Lion and Mountain Lion, finally getting back on the upgrade train with Mavricks, so I ran Snow Leopard for about four years.
frollogaston 3mo ago
I like how macOS is today, but Snow Leopard was the best version for its time. Also the biggest upgrade was Leopard to SL, biggest downgrade was SL to Lion. So idk what the author's complaint is.
boesboes 3mo ago
Bullshit
jtfrench 3mo ago
Snow Leopard _did_ focus on stability. It wasn't just marketing. Did new bugs (and even new features) slip in? Yes, of course. It's still an OS made by humans, making imperfect cost-benefit calculations on how to mitigate risk while providing increased value to the end user. So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.
blackhaz 3mo ago
Whoever was in charge of Mac OS X at that time should be promoted to the President of Operating Systems of this entire planet.
graemep 3mo ago
A lot of comments are missing (IMO) the main point, which is the conclusion in the last paragraph. > Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification. A lot of people want stability and polish. They get enshittification. I regard mobile app updates as new versions are usually worse TomTom (the free version - that replaced Amigo) is a good example. A major update took away the feature that most made me use it in the first place - it had full screen turn indicators you could see without looking at it directly (so not looking away from the road). On the other hand its hard to think of a mobile app or website update that actually added anything I want recently. Things like Facebook certainly keep getting worse (especially for a group admin which is why I usually go on there). Banking websites mostly want to seem to push you to use the app.
flyingshelf 3mo ago
Any change is a breaking change. The release cleaned things up, this inevitably led to deprecated parts being dropped and unwanted/undefined/outdated behavior being changed. Just because it's marked as "no feature" it doesn't mean it was a "no user changes" release.
waffletower 3mo ago
This article is revisionist and lost -- it decidedly disagrees with my direct memory. I had Snow Leopard on a vm for years -- not because I was misguided, but because it was a very stable release in many dimensions and deserved its status.
frollogaston 3mo ago
"As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard" Those early MacBooks had 32-bit CPUs. Wonder if Snow Leopard was problematic on those, since that's when Apple started the transition to 64-bit, finalizing in Lion. Would still be bad if this were the reason, but might also explain why other people had a better experience.
nkotov 3mo ago
I still have a MacBook from that era and to this day - it boots up and runs apps fine without issues (though a bit slower than I'm used to). It's been my little time capsule of how my life was in middle school / high school.
jasonvorhe 3mo ago
Performance wise 10.6 had a significant impact positive on my old MBP4,1 (the last non-unibody MacBook) and back then I was sure it mainly was because of GCD and Core Animation.
Terratrader 3mo ago
I Think Apple's latest OS versions are completely beyond snow leopard. Apple has destroyed their product with extreme security and sandboxing. It has become completely pay to play. I simply stopped upgrading since thing only get worse. As for other companies' 'snow leopard', that is their business. What I remember about snow leopard is that I could do with my Mac what I wanted, now I have to circumvent one security after another and eventually use Google to get a format that I need. Use Google, can you imagine? It's a complete disappointment

132 points by speckx 3mo ago

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogfood while we made our own mistakes on iOS. As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated.

pico303 3mo ago
There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism. Snow Leopard was a great experience for me. So much more stable, and the OS felt tighter, like lots of the little wonky things got sorted out. It well deserves its credit and more operating systems should focus on bug fix releases once in a while.
- ndiddy 3mo ago
  FreeBSD is not a GPL OS either.
- mepian 3mo ago
  FreeBSD is definitely not a "GPL OS", the license is right in the name!
  - ido 3mo ago
    To be pedantic “BSD” is the name of the original distribution that FreeBSD is based on, and the license is also named after it (rather than FreeBSD being named after the license).
  - frollogaston 3mo ago
    Guess he meant non-free OS. I still don't get the point though, cause someone who cares so much about FOSS wouldn't be criticizing SL vs Leopard, he'd just not use Mac OS.
- vor_ 3mo ago
  I'd say Snow Leopard was as buggy as any other typical OS X release from that era, as covered by the Jeff Johnson article. The reality is that the "no new features" marketing was most likely a positive spin on the shift in engineering resources toward iOS, which had previously caused Leopard's release to be delayed.
- anthk 3mo ago
  FreeBSD is not GPL and in that era FreeBSD was almot the low-level Mac OS X testground for ex-FreeBSD developers working for Apple.
ndiddy 3mo ago
> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point releases of Snow Leopard as a high point for stability because of the years of bug fixes that had gone into the system by then. > As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. I don't know anybody who's switched to Mac because of a feature they added in the latest OS release. It's always because of the better price-performance, the better battery life, or because Windows got too glitchy and annoying. The only new Mac OS feature from the past few years that I can even name off the top of my head is when they finally added window snapping with Sequoia.
- trueno 3mo ago
  mayhaps we've just moved the goal post on what constitutes a major release a lil too far. redefine what is major, scale that back and ship in a year cycle and not necessarily need to ship anything that pushes you past the threshold of "we're still beta testing even after release, and now the users are the QA team". just bring that definition of "a major software upgrade" back a bit. everyone should do it, i'd be super happy if "major upgrade" meant a new icon set and some exciting thoroughly vetted new utilities/apps. thrilled even.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop.
  - alsetmusic 3mo ago
    > When you have a bunch of windows open but you click on the desktop, the windows go off to the edges so you can see the desktop. It's one of the first things I turn off.
  - 3mo ago
lapcat 3mo ago
> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I'm not sure this is a good place to debate my article when the author of the submitted article merely linked to mine. It appears that Ruben Schade downgraded to 10.5 from 10.6.2, which was still pretty early in the Snow Leopard cycle, then "tried it again a few months later" and downgraded again, until 10.7 Lion (which I personally hated and skipped on my main Mac). Thus, Schade never experienced the later versions of Snow Leopard that everyone remembers fondly.
- thomassmith65 3mo ago
  I just reread the blogpost (by the parent) that this article cites, and its points all seem correct to me, including that "Mac OS X 10.6.0 was certainly much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8": • 10.6 was not primarily about bug fixes • 10.7 was buggy and its design was incoherent • Apple should abandon its yearly release cycle That said, my recollections from the time are that the 10.6 GM release caused fewer problems than the 10.5 GM. It wouldn't surprise me if the consensus about Snow Leopard switches to the opinion that Snow Leopard was no better than any other version. That's wrong, but few people still use or remember using Snow Leopard.
- masswerk 3mo ago
  Yes, the version of Snow Leopard people are referring to (and have fond memories of, me included) was 10.6.8.x. The point is really that it was given time to mature. (Back in the day, users used to explicitly refer to "10.8.6", and not just globally to "Snow Leopard". Similar to how people used to refer to 7.5.5 and 7.6.2 specifically.)
musicale 3mo ago
> When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated What about the recent macOS releases that seem to prioritize dubious features (Apple Intelligence) that don't add a lot of value (and don't work well), while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass (not to mention the broken window resize region, inconsistent spacing and corner radii, menu items being hidden under the notch, the off-center Windows menu, scrollbars that are either invisible or hard to target, etc.) Liquid Glass was inexcusable as it opposed the fundamental UI principles of clarity and legibility. Apple basically ignored its own design principles.
- alsetmusic 3mo ago
  > while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass This is why Apple nerds (like me) are hopeful that John Ternus will refocus the company. Steve said that companies that want to make good software should make their own hardware. I only learned that Alan Kay said that first when looking to make sure that I had this quote correct. Alan Dye is gone. The guy who was completely unqualified to lead UI design is no longer in charge. Tim Cook will soon move to a new role. The business guy is stepping aside. An actual engineer with no business degree is gonna be in charge. Maybe things will become sane again. I hope so. Fwiw, Apple nerds who care about UI design would enjoy the recent Talk Show episode (Daring Fireball, John Gruber, the Markdown guy) ep with Louie Mantia. He's a designer who expresses why Dye was unfit for the job in a satisfying way. Just woke, probably typos and mistakes.
alberth 3mo ago
> As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service When companies use to charge for OS … and the releases were staggered by 3-4 years, I would have agreed. But when OS upgrades are free, and happen yearly - there’s a different user expectation.
- panta 3mo ago
  I'd gladly pay for the OS if this guaranteed abstaining from unnecessary changes and/or from removing useful features (eg 2d Spaces in Leopard and Snow Leopard, replaced by the inferior abomination that is Mission Control)
steveBK123 3mo ago
> don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable. Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things". I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I don't need the design language of the windows changed annually. I don't need the icons of all my apps to change annually. An OS is a tool that serves the purpose of granting me access to all my other tools (apps).
- spunker540 3mo ago
  I agree- I also dont think OS features of the kind that get shipped in these updates are convincing anyone to switch from pc to mac or upgrade their mac sooner. Tons of stuff just changing for the sake of change. Meanwhile LLMs increasingly only need the command line to do everything.
- dwaite 3mo ago
  One big source of both delays and bugs is the feeling that your work (which has compatibility impacting changes) _has_ to make it in the current release, because otherwise it will languish for years until the next train leaves. Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like Cocoa outline views broken for multiple years because the fix required API changes.
  - manxiemanx 3mo ago
    Understandable from a developers perspective but this is what management is for. This is a great indicator that Apple's current software management is doing a bad job. Because their job is to say no and come up with the plan that will make the software quality and one time. It's really the only thing they do that matters
rlt 3mo ago
> As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features Is this true of operating systems for most people? Personally I’d take macOS from 15 years ago (with security bug fixes and new hardware support, assuming modern apps still worked, but no new features) over today’s Windows any day.
manxiemanx 3mo ago
No one said major software updates are impossible on a yearly schedule. It's obviously possible since Apple's been doing it. What's not possible is major software updates with a normal amount of new features for a major software update at a reasonable level of quality

dlcarrier 3mo ago

Why write working software once, when you can make an entire career out of constantly refactoring a new broken mess?

Amorymeltzer 3mo ago

YMMV. I ran Snow Leopard on a couple of machines for years—bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square—and it was far and away the best OSX experience I had, and, at least in my experience, the best/smoothest/most stable until El Capitan, 10.11. And yes, maybe I'm thinking of 10.6.8, but I don't see why that's a problem. The myth part, is of course, a myth, and good marketing. Snow Leopard was super important for the OS, changing a ton: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_changed_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...>. Marketing gonna market. Regardless, I can agree with this: >People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.

ch_sm 3mo ago
> bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square haha that‘s a nice nostalgic image. I remember installing it on a friend’s laptop with my DVD in a café, to „fix her macbook“.

gord288 3mo ago

As I recall, there were plenty of legitimate user gripes when the very first iteration of Snow Leopard (10.6.0) was released. But by the time of the very last point-release (10.6.11?), the OS was rock-solid. It was only after all the initial bugs were ironed out, that Snow Leopard achieved the legendary status that it has enjoyed ever since. The blogger doesn’t take this factor into account.

cosmic_cheese 3mo ago
Mavericks played out similarly as far as I can recall. Earlier releases had issues but by the last minor update it was quite solid. 10.9 my personal “Snow Leopard”. It has most of what made the Aqua era releases good with some QoL/polish improvements. If I could patch it with non-flat scrollbars and 10.5/10.6 2D grid spaces it’d be perfect.
kccqzy 3mo ago
It was 10.6.8 v1.1. They didn’t want to increment the version number so they made a version number on top of a version number.
- frollogaston 3mo ago
  That number 10.6.8 is burned into my brain because I was on that release for so long.
snowwrestler 3mo ago
This is true, but it’s also true of many other OS X and MacOS releases over the years. You’ve definitely hit on the core of the issue with the Snow Leopard myth, though: comparing the final battle-hardened bug-patched version of an OS, to a newly released version. Seems like “Snow Leopard” always gets trotted out whenever someone is unhappy with the latest release.
- bitwize 3mo ago
  See also: Windows XP. Upon release it was a security/stability CF. Today there are retrocomputing forums dedicated primarily to it. What they are gazing rose-coloredly back on is likely Windows XP SP3, not how the OS was upon its release.

internet2000 3mo ago

Snow Leopard wasn't significantly any better or worse than other Mac OS versions of the time. It was just around for longer, after Leopard which was also around for longer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Mac_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Mac_opera... More dot releases fixed stuff and people grew used to its quirks (which there were many). Note that the lull also lined up with the intense focus and high development pace Apple had on iOS in the early years. Ironically making the commentariat of the time ask if Apple had given up on the Mac.

giantfrog 3mo ago

I have great memories of Snow Leopard. It even gave you back a few GB of storage (IIRC) at a time when every GB really counted.

slig 3mo ago
Apple still sells 256gb disks, I'd say every GB still matters.
- giantfrog 3mo ago
  Fair!
kccqzy 3mo ago
Yes. I was poking around all the different ways Apple was shaving storage and I found that the Leopard welcome animation (showing the word welcome in different languages in a galaxy) was stored in JPEGs, one for each frame; the Snow Leopard one was finally a video in H.264.
- ebbi 3mo ago
  I miss those welcome videos!
delta_p_delta_x 3mo ago
I got 30 GB back on a 256 GB hard disk drive. It was amazing.
lurkerforawhile 3mo ago
fond fond fond memories of Snow Leopard. I was just a kid back then, so I guess I missed the complaints that people are mentioning here, but even back then no shiny new features but an improved and refined product seemed like a good/brave idea. something I'd like to see more of.

jpurnell 3mo ago

Wasn't a lot of Snow Leopard an exercise in removing old cruft from the PowerPC architecture, and the last release to support 32-bit Intel machines? From my perspective at the time, it was really meant to set up Mac for the next decade or so, which it did brilliantly.

skhr0680 3mo ago
Mountain Lion dropped support for 32 bit kernel. I only know this because Apple didn’t provide a patch for first generation Mac Pro users, even though the CPUs were 64 bit and could run Mountain Lion just fine.
vor_ 3mo ago
That's not how I remember it. In fact, Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release, I'd say. As explained in the article, that mythology of a stable release was formed over time later on.
- simondotau 3mo ago
  I don't know what the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are, but I think the article paints a misleading picture by leaving unstated how polished 10.5.8 wasn't. Sure 10.6.0 had some new bugs due to landing major new under-the-hood technologies, but there were no serious regressions. It was a rare major release where you could install it on day one and not end up regretting it. Of course 10.6 got better over time, and 10.6.8 was the best release of them all, and it was followed by Apple's answer to Windows Vista. But that doesn't mean 10.6.0 sucked.

mrkpdl 3mo ago

Another underlying reason snow leopard is so fondly remembered is it was the final purely Mac version of Mac OS X. Starting with lion the focus shifted to bringing iOS-like features and design to Mac OS X. And it has never been Mac first since.

sys_64738 3mo ago

The final SL point release was very stable. Still is. Lion was a horrible and nasty release which shouldn't have seen the light of day. FWIW, SL introduced several new UI elements into OS X as they needed something to show off at release. Something. Anything.

VCFundedGenYer 3mo ago

I don't agree, as someone who lived that era. Snow Leopard was the best OS X release in terms of performance, made immediately apparent by the disastrous release of 10.7 Lion and several years beyond. You have to remember that 10.5 was a bad and slow release. 10.6 cleaned that up, and gave you a lot of storage space back alongside the fixes and improvements.

vor_ 3mo ago
I lived that era too, and Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release. What actually happened is that engineers had been shifted over to iOS, which delayed Leopard. By the time of Snow Leopard, to put a positive spin on that lack of resources, Snow Leopard was a "no new features" release...even though it actually did receive new features as well as new bugs. There was even an infamous data loss bug involving guest accounts (https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-deletes-all-user-data-idUS698539042/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...)! But people have forgotten about that and only remember the marketing now.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
  PLEASE stop saying the same thing to every single person!
frollogaston 3mo ago
I remember 10.6 being good too, but wasn't 10.6's storage refund only because they dropped PPC support? Makes that part a lot less impressive.

lisper 3mo ago

Here is what I wrote about it at the time: https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster... Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.

fastball 3mo ago

I remember going from Tiger to Leopard and thinking "this is nice, I like a lot of these changes" and then going from Leopard to Snow Leopard and thinking "wow this is great". Then Lion came along and I was like "this is meh". So maybe it wasn't peak performance or reliability that caused the feeling, but there was definitely something better about SL, and the reason I know it wasn't just nostalgic rose-tinting is because it was bookended by releases I liked worse.

vor_ 3mo ago

Snow Leopard was so buggy that it had an infamous data loss bug: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-deletes-all-user-data-idUS698539042/ https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d... People forget these things after they get patched out and time passes. What's left behind as memories fade is a feel-good mythology about a bug fix release that never really existed. The truth was that engineering resources had been shifted to iOS, which delayed Leopard, and the "no new features" marketing was a way of justifying the lack of resources.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 3mo ago
It’s annoying to read what amounts to the same reply multiple times in a thread, and needing to commit your username to memory to remember if it was you or not.
frollogaston 3mo ago
The guest account bug was the one thing. But who still uses guest accounts in 2009?

jitl 3mo ago

Bring back grid Expose and grid virtual desktops!

Grombobulous 3mo ago
https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/ https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/

keeganpoppen 3mo ago

i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?

jogu 3mo ago
Yeah, there's a sentence about how they downgraded twice!
- mcphage 3mo ago
  There's also the bit where none of us cold be old enough to remember it in person, and so everything we say about it is just vibes that we picked up from the internet.

jimbob45 3mo ago

Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it. Microsoft ignored everyone and said, “You fool users just don’t understand what makes a good operating system.” Snow Leopard was the next major OS release and it just worked the way people expected an OS to work. Paired with solid understated marketing, it felt like users were respected for their choices in an OS once again. MS was forced to follow suit with W7. Now, MS is back to ignoring users by forcing telemetry and AI. Too bad we don’t still have Steve Jobs to show them how it’s done.

foobar1962 3mo ago
> Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it. People had difficultly opening the plastic case it came in. I did. Ms added a red pull tab to indicate an affordance, then later changed the case to a simple clam shell for Windows 7.

EPWN3D 3mo ago

I'm sorry, but this is horseshit. Snow Leopard is beloved by the Mac user base for a reason. It was legitimately faster and more stable than any prior release.

LegNeato 3mo ago

Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally for us to look at and determine if it should go in an update. I packaged and audited the builds and tuned the delta vs full updates. I built the system that largely automated diffing "trains" for software updates (automastering). The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different. Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. I am not sure why people on the internet don't believe that, but I was there. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. In normal feature releases it operated bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?". AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs. The first .1 or .2 ALWAYS fixed critical bugs, because: 1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in software updates...which was developed concurrently with the end of the main release (hence why .1 came out right away) 2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested. Software updates are always needed, though the issues they fix became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices. But I can tell you FOR A FACT that Snow Leopard had fewer major bugs over its lifetime, coalesced very quickly, and was extremely solid when Lion was released.

tragiclos 3mo ago

This was my memory as well. Lion was the first version of OS X that was usable as a daily driver.

mrkpdl 3mo ago
For me panther (10.3) was more than adequate as a daily driver for the time. Fantastic OS.

moralestapia 3mo ago

Sorry dude, but you're a liar. Not long ago, a friend of my dad was showing me his old Macbook Pro (one of those big 17-inch aluminum ones). He never upgraded the OS and somehow Safari can still open his email and he has Word and stuff. That thing was running soooooo smoooth, zero lag, no flickering, no quirks, apps open immediately, etc. That release was peak OS X. I have an M5 Max and it doesn't feel that good. Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.

nickm12 3mo ago

I remember Snow Leopard as a particularly stable release, but it's been so long this could easily be misremembering. One other thing that was notable about Snow Leopard, though, was that it was the last release before the iOSification of the Mac. Starting with Lion, Apple increasingly tried to unify the platforms and bring ideas and designs from iOS to the Mac, with mixed success. For myself Snow Leopard holds a special place as the last "pure Mac" release and a culmination of a decade of Mac OS X releases. I skipped over Lion and Mountain Lion, finally getting back on the upgrade train with Mavricks, so I ran Snow Leopard for about four years.

frollogaston 3mo ago

I like how macOS is today, but Snow Leopard was the best version for its time. Also the biggest upgrade was Leopard to SL, biggest downgrade was SL to Lion. So idk what the author's complaint is.

boesboes 3mo ago

Bullshit

jtfrench 3mo ago

Snow Leopard _did_ focus on stability. It wasn't just marketing. Did new bugs (and even new features) slip in? Yes, of course. It's still an OS made by humans, making imperfect cost-benefit calculations on how to mitigate risk while providing increased value to the end user. So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.

blackhaz 3mo ago

Whoever was in charge of Mac OS X at that time should be promoted to the President of Operating Systems of this entire planet.

graemep 3mo ago

A lot of comments are missing (IMO) the main point, which is the conclusion in the last paragraph. > Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification. A lot of people want stability and polish. They get enshittification. I regard mobile app updates as new versions are usually worse TomTom (the free version - that replaced Amigo) is a good example. A major update took away the feature that most made me use it in the first place - it had full screen turn indicators you could see without looking at it directly (so not looking away from the road). On the other hand its hard to think of a mobile app or website update that actually added anything I want recently. Things like Facebook certainly keep getting worse (especially for a group admin which is why I usually go on there). Banking websites mostly want to seem to push you to use the app.

flyingshelf 3mo ago

Any change is a breaking change. The release cleaned things up, this inevitably led to deprecated parts being dropped and unwanted/undefined/outdated behavior being changed. Just because it's marked as "no feature" it doesn't mean it was a "no user changes" release.

waffletower 3mo ago

This article is revisionist and lost -- it decidedly disagrees with my direct memory. I had Snow Leopard on a vm for years -- not because I was misguided, but because it was a very stable release in many dimensions and deserved its status.

frollogaston 3mo ago

"As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard" Those early MacBooks had 32-bit CPUs. Wonder if Snow Leopard was problematic on those, since that's when Apple started the transition to 64-bit, finalizing in Lion. Would still be bad if this were the reason, but might also explain why other people had a better experience.

nkotov 3mo ago

I still have a MacBook from that era and to this day - it boots up and runs apps fine without issues (though a bit slower than I'm used to). It's been my little time capsule of how my life was in middle school / high school.

jasonvorhe 3mo ago

Performance wise 10.6 had a significant impact positive on my old MBP4,1 (the last non-unibody MacBook) and back then I was sure it mainly was because of GCD and Core Animation.

Terratrader 3mo ago

I Think Apple's latest OS versions are completely beyond snow leopard. Apple has destroyed their product with extreme security and sandboxing. It has become completely pay to play. I simply stopped upgrading since thing only get worse. As for other companies' 'snow leopard', that is their business. What I remember about snow leopard is that I could do with my Mac what I wanted, now I have to circumvent one security after another and eventually use Google to get a format that I need. Use Google, can you imagine? It's a complete disappointment