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.
I was there too, but this blog post agrees with my memory.
I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since.
My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.
Snow Leopard shipped a new 64-bit Cocoa Finder too, but no one noticed because it was almost a pixel perfect and behaviour perfect copy of the previous one.
There was something else going on during that time period though.
Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.
Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.
Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.
The impression of XP being the best version of Windows came after at least two service packs (patch bundles / minor releases, for those unfamiliar) and the Vista shitshow. First Windows release that was good from the very beginning was 7.
Ahem, the best version of Windows was 2000 / 2003 x64 server. It had all the improvements from real world experience gained by NT 3.5 and 4.0 and none of the consumer crap pushed in XP by the abandonment of the Win95 line.
That indeed was the best business edition of Windows. Consumers weren't supposed to have that though. The then-consumer edition was Windows ME, which... wasn't as good.
It was definitely a great release. I think that’s a big part of why it’s become legendary.
To me the myth is the “no new features”. Apple may have said that in places in marketing but there were new features. Grand Central Dispatch for example.
Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card).
Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'd say is the first "modern" OSX release, with subsystems like launchd and a more mature OpenDirectory replacing older NeXT subsystems.
Leopard in my experience was a train wreck. It shipped a lot of new features, both user facing and back end frameworks, but the development was seriously impacted from teams losing engineers to iOS. Leopard had features planned assuming 100% availability of SWE's resources but ended up with 40-50% of SWE's resources (made up numbers based on my feels at the time). Many new frameworks in Leopard did not land or get stable until very late in the development cycle which meant everything downstream had to scramble right before GM. It was 100% the case that Leopard was not really stable until 10.5.8 and still sucked IMHO.
There was a lot of clean-up needed in MacOS and that was Snow Leopard. It was not a perfect release but 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable. Dropping PowerPC support really helped focus QA since they didn't need the massive array of test hardware Tiger and Leopard required. You also didn't need to wrangle builds for four architectures, including multiple compilers as a few libraries (if not whole frameworks) were compiled with ICC on x86 for performance reasons.
The "Snow Leopard wasn't that great" meme is weird. I'm sure it had its problems like every OSX release did. Unfortunately most OSX releases broke someone's workflow[0]. Snow Leopard ware no different. But it was always billed internally as a "no new features" release and those features that it did ship faced a very high bar to get in the release. I definitely look back on Snow Leopard as a high water mark for macOS quality in terms of a release.
From the outside, Tiger always seemed insanely multifaceted. Supported the four architectures you mentioned AND was the only release to have both Rosetta and Classic mode. Despite all that, it seemed pretty stable.
> 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable.
10.6.3 actually introduced a CFNetwork/NSURLConnection crash with HTTP 301 redirects that plagued many people including me and lasted way too many OS X updates afterward. (This was originally Radar 7816615, now FB6066729, see also https://openradar.appspot.com/7841731)
> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing.
That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.
> If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high.
What was defined as a feature? The first new thing I noticed in Snow Leopard was that Quick Look could now preview Adobe Illustrator files (it was not the case in Leopard). I very much welcomed that, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature addition that would clear a high bar.
I ran Leopard and upgraded to Snow Leopard on a 2006 Core Duo MB Pro as well. My memory is very hazy on details, but I had remember no issues at all with either one. It was a difficult time in my life, as I my employer essentially laid everyone off in late 2009 and I spent the next 18 months unemployed. During that time my Mac was an utterly reliable means of job hunting, studying for certifications, and applying for unemployment.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until recently, no reasonable person ever expected a major new OS release to be rock solid before its first major point-release. And actually nothing has changed, except that what we used to call a "point-zero" release is now called a Public Beta.
Windows XP was sufficiently reliable by SP1, sufficiently secure by SP2, and sufficiently prepared for an extended lifespan by SP3.
Vista wasn't garbage. In fact, Vista and 7 precisely parallel Leopard and Snow Leopard both in timelines and in release quality—a somewhat rushed, haphazard release of a new OS with tons of new features, many of which were considerably more resource-intensive than the previous release. 7 was more or less Vista SP3. The design language didn't even change except the Start bar.
People had bad experiences on Vista because they tried to run Windows Aero on 2001 hardware, and hardware vendors for once strong-armed MS into certifying their half-decade-old hardware as 'ready for Vista'.
I had a brand new PC that came with Vista on it, it was terrible. Not just slow but also BSODs and bad UI. School PCs were higher end than mine but also had BSODs.
The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.
Yeah, it was that. Win7 became stable but kept some or all of the Vista bloat, but people noticed less because PCs were faster by then. I barely use Windows but could see XP as the best-ever version of it if they'd kept it up to date.
Windows XP was when they started putting the activation bullshit in, which was just a little too much for privacy-brained me. I had migrated to Linux pretty much exclusively by then.
Indeed. Just like OSX 10.6.8, Windows XP SP2 was the version that made Windows XP actually stable, and then SP3 added on top of that. But initial Windows XP (not even SP1) sucked big times indeed. Although not like Windows Millennium :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was there too, but this blog post agrees with my memory.
I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since.
My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.
Snow Leopard shipped a new 64-bit Cocoa Finder too, but no one noticed because it was almost a pixel perfect and behaviour perfect copy of the previous one.
> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.
There was something else going on during that time period though.
Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.
Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.
Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.
Without protected memory, if an application crashed you’d have to hard restart. I lost so much work in the 90s/2000s. Great times!
The impression of XP being the best version of Windows came after at least two service packs (patch bundles / minor releases, for those unfamiliar) and the Vista shitshow. First Windows release that was good from the very beginning was 7.
I was young, but I remember people disliking XP until SP2
Ahem, the best version of Windows was 2000 / 2003 x64 server. It had all the improvements from real world experience gained by NT 3.5 and 4.0 and none of the consumer crap pushed in XP by the abandonment of the Win95 line.
That indeed was the best business edition of Windows. Consumers weren't supposed to have that though. The then-consumer edition was Windows ME, which... wasn't as good.
It was definitely a great release. I think that’s a big part of why it’s become legendary.
To me the myth is the “no new features”. Apple may have said that in places in marketing but there were new features. Grand Central Dispatch for example.
But in the legend that fact is lost.
Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card).
Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'd say is the first "modern" OSX release, with subsystems like launchd and a more mature OpenDirectory replacing older NeXT subsystems.
Leopard in my experience was a train wreck. It shipped a lot of new features, both user facing and back end frameworks, but the development was seriously impacted from teams losing engineers to iOS. Leopard had features planned assuming 100% availability of SWE's resources but ended up with 40-50% of SWE's resources (made up numbers based on my feels at the time). Many new frameworks in Leopard did not land or get stable until very late in the development cycle which meant everything downstream had to scramble right before GM. It was 100% the case that Leopard was not really stable until 10.5.8 and still sucked IMHO.
There was a lot of clean-up needed in MacOS and that was Snow Leopard. It was not a perfect release but 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable. Dropping PowerPC support really helped focus QA since they didn't need the massive array of test hardware Tiger and Leopard required. You also didn't need to wrangle builds for four architectures, including multiple compilers as a few libraries (if not whole frameworks) were compiled with ICC on x86 for performance reasons.
The "Snow Leopard wasn't that great" meme is weird. I'm sure it had its problems like every OSX release did. Unfortunately most OSX releases broke someone's workflow[0]. Snow Leopard ware no different. But it was always billed internally as a "no new features" release and those features that it did ship faced a very high bar to get in the release. I definitely look back on Snow Leopard as a high water mark for macOS quality in terms of a release.
[0] https://xkcd.com/1172/
From the outside, Tiger always seemed insanely multifaceted. Supported the four architectures you mentioned AND was the only release to have both Rosetta and Classic mode. Despite all that, it seemed pretty stable.
iOS killed the macOS star...
And instead of controlling our apps, ios devs just slap in any old SDK without reprisal
> 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable.
10.6.3 actually introduced a CFNetwork/NSURLConnection crash with HTTP 301 redirects that plagued many people including me and lasted way too many OS X updates afterward. (This was originally Radar 7816615, now FB6066729, see also https://openradar.appspot.com/7841731)
From years of experience with Apple software, I'm never installing any y.0
From years of experience with all software, I'm never installing any y.0
> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing.
That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.
> with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems.
I mean, what software is bug-free? Fewer bugs is a big deal. Less-severe bugs is a big deal.
Thank you! Finally, someone with insider knowledge telling the real story.
> If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high.
What was defined as a feature? The first new thing I noticed in Snow Leopard was that Quick Look could now preview Adobe Illustrator files (it was not the case in Leopard). I very much welcomed that, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature addition that would clear a high bar.
That also sounds like a very self-contained feature
I ran Leopard and upgraded to Snow Leopard on a 2006 Core Duo MB Pro as well. My memory is very hazy on details, but I had remember no issues at all with either one. It was a difficult time in my life, as I my employer essentially laid everyone off in late 2009 and I spent the next 18 months unemployed. During that time my Mac was an utterly reliable means of job hunting, studying for certifications, and applying for unemployment.
> 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.
Thank you for admitting that.
> Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind
Also the last, apparently.
How about Mountain Lion vs Lion?
Also High Sierra vs Sierra. And probably most of the newer ones after that since they were all incremental up to Tahoe?
iOS 27 and macOS 27 are very similar in spirit.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Honestly, the only reason why my new laptop was a Mac was because I couldn't get a comparable one without a Copilot button. I use both control keys.
Yes, I know about system 76 and framework, but they're not what I was looking for.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
FreeBSD is definitely not a "GPL OS", the license is right in the name!
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.
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).
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.
FreeBSD is not a GPL OS either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That number 10.6.8 is burned into my brain because I was on that release for so long.
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.
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.
Until recently, no reasonable person ever expected a major new OS release to be rock solid before its first major point-release. And actually nothing has changed, except that what we used to call a "point-zero" release is now called a Public Beta.
Windows XP was sufficiently reliable by SP1, sufficiently secure by SP2, and sufficiently prepared for an extended lifespan by SP3.
Because it was followed by garbage that didn't get taken out until 7, which was soon after followed by permanent forced garbage.
Vista wasn't garbage. In fact, Vista and 7 precisely parallel Leopard and Snow Leopard both in timelines and in release quality—a somewhat rushed, haphazard release of a new OS with tons of new features, many of which were considerably more resource-intensive than the previous release. 7 was more or less Vista SP3. The design language didn't even change except the Start bar.
People had bad experiences on Vista because they tried to run Windows Aero on 2001 hardware, and hardware vendors for once strong-armed MS into certifying their half-decade-old hardware as 'ready for Vista'.
I had a brand new PC that came with Vista on it, it was terrible. Not just slow but also BSODs and bad UI. School PCs were higher end than mine but also had BSODs.
The BSODs were largely because Vista changed the driver API so everybody had to write new drivers. I remember seeing an article saying that Microsoft's telemetry showed that ~30% of all Vista BSODs were caused by the nVidia graphics driver. Windows 7 came out a few years later with the same driver API, so by then everybody had gotten most of the kinks worked out of their drivers.
Yeah, it was that. Win7 became stable but kept some or all of the Vista bloat, but people noticed less because PCs were faster by then. I barely use Windows but could see XP as the best-ever version of it if they'd kept it up to date.
Windows 2000 was peak.
Windows XP was when they started putting the activation bullshit in, which was just a little too much for privacy-brained me. I had migrated to Linux pretty much exclusively by then.
Indeed. Just like OSX 10.6.8, Windows XP SP2 was the version that made Windows XP actually stable, and then SP3 added on top of that. But initial Windows XP (not even SP1) sucked big times indeed. Although not like Windows Millennium :)
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.
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-d...)! But people have forgotten about that and only remember the marketing now.
PLEASE stop saying the same thing to every single person!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I miss those welcome videos!
Apple still sells 256gb disks, I'd say every GB still matters.
Fair!
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.
I got 30 GB back on a 256 GB hard disk drive. It was amazing.
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.
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.
Here is what I wrote about it at the time:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster...
Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.
Snow Leopard was so buggy that it had an infamous data loss bug: 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.
The guest account bug was the one thing. But who still uses guest accounts in 2009?
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.
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_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.
> 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“.
Why write working software once, when you can make an entire career out of constantly refactoring a new broken mess?
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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_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.
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.
"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.
Whoever was in charge of Mac OS X at that time should be promoted to the President of Operating Systems of this entire planet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?
Yeah, there's a sentence about how they downgraded twice!
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.
This was my memory as well. Lion was the first version of OS X that was usable as a daily driver.
For me panther (10.3) was more than adequate as a daily driver for the time. Fantastic OS.
Bring back grid Expose and grid virtual desktops!
https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/
Bullshit