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Comment by 27182818284 | Hacker News Reader

Obviously responses are going to be pretty dependent on the person. For me personally the peak was Snow Leopard, then it plateaued for a bit, and then I feel like it has been downhill starting with Mavericks.

Snow Leopard was so good I used to evangelize and talk about how great an OS it was with people who probably didn't know OS stood for operating system. It was that good. Now, heck, I haven't even installed the latest because I hear nothing but bad and in the on-stage demos there isn't a single thing that makes me think, "ooh I want that" It obviously has a product-market fit with a lot of people, I'm just not one of them. I'll eventually update just to make future updates easier on myself, but I have no pressing need.

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Ditto on Snow Leopard. I had to muck through the version history to figure out which release I was considering the "last good, exciting release." Turns out we all agree. The divide is... stark. That said, High Sierra seems to trend back up towards the level of ambition we saw in the 200x releases.

    2001 10.1 Puma:          First OS X to ship by default
    2002 10.2 Jaguar:        GPU compositing, Mail.app, Address Book, MP4
    2003 10.3 Panther:       Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine
    2005 10.4 Tiger:         Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video
    2007 10.5 Leopard:       Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel
    2009 10.6 Snow Leopard:  App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM
    2011 10.7 Lion:          Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch
    2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center
    2013 10.9 Mavericks:     iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration
    2014 10.10 Yosemite:     Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff
    2015 10.11 El Capitan:   San Francisco font, Metal API
    2016 10.12 Sierra:       Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift
    2017 10.13 High Sierra:  HEVC, APFS, VR

Snow Leopard had problems when it was released. I recall major issues with Mail and WiFi, among others. It was especially frustrating because Apple had made such a big deal about how 10.6 was going to focus on stability and fixing bugs.

Of course it did become very reliable. We remember Snow Leopard that way now, because we remember the last stable version of it. El Cap is very stable for me today. High Sierra certainly still has a chance to get there too.

So, I agree with the GP that Apple has never been in a place where they could release v0 of a new OS X major version without issues. That has certainly not been my experience. I always wait at least a few months before upgrading, sometimes longer.

To be honest, Snow Leopard was an immediate improvement on the abomination that was Leopard.

The only reason, to me, that I remember Snow Leopard as being so good is because Leopard was a steaming pile of slow shit.

Yep, agree 100%.

10.6.8 on the early unibody Macbook Pros was excellent.

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