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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Thank you! Finally, someone with insider knowledge telling the real story.
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/
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Apple still sells 256gb disks, I'd say every GB still matters.
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.
Why write working software once, when you can make an entire career out of constantly refactoring a new broken mess?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was my memory as well. Lion was the first version of OS X that was usable as a daily driver.
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!
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.
Bring back grid Expose and grid virtual desktops!
https://gridlion.hopefullyuseful.com/
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'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.