How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability | Hacker News Reader

How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability

9to5mac.com

71 pointsrusk104 comments

Try this out: Take any current MacOS release, any recent one you like. Now, look at the versions of all the core tools. Stuff like readlink(1). Basic UNIX tools. Look at the manual page, and note the dates. This is the date of the tool it was last synced from FreeBSD.

Spoiler: 10.6 is the last release anything significant in the base system was updated. It's been left to stagnate ever since. For anyone relying on MacOS as a UNIX system for development, testing or heaven forbid, deployment, this release marked the end of any serious maintenance work and the divergence of MacOS X from the mainstream. It's now a decade out of date.

That's not to say no development has taken place. There's a lot gone on at a higher level. But the base system is so outdated it's now presenting real compatibility problems. Scripts which work on Linux and the BSDs may no longer work on MacOS: it's missing a decade of improvements, options, and bugfixes we all take for granted. The complete lack of care here is beyond ridicule. Surely a company like Apple could hire one person to take care of this. It's not like routine maintenance is particularly onerous.

Apple also removed Samba from macOS for the same reason it didn't update bash or readline in ages: the GPLv3.

Current Apple is sitting on the quality of the past. I wonder when they'll consume it all.

They are shitting on the quality of the past. They are running on brand recognition, at least in the Computer space. iPhones are still amazing.

They reached to that amazing state around iPhone 5 when competitors were years behind. Not sure why the world is not on a riot with that weird pack of icons since iOS 7 but yeah, they're still good, just not much better on each releases.

I've used OS X since the very first betas. Every release has had its bugs, but every release has been an improvement too.

I don't get the praise/hate online for different releases, or the narrative that Apple's software quality is turning to crap. It's too shrill to be genuine.

Are there still annoyances or things that could be better in macOS? Of course. Is it better than the alternatives or than it used to be? Yes.

I also don't get why you wouldn't want to upgrade to the latest version. At least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the middle of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could mention.

Having said that, the initial release of 10.5 Leopard was known as Leper amongst my friends due to its general tendency to fall over all the time...

There is one clear difference between past releases and current releases which would mean you and the complainers could both be right: the length of the release cycle. Starting with Mountain Lion, Apple committed itself to a yearly release cycle for macOS. Prior to this the releases would generally take about 2 years.

Now, if we take your premise that macOS releases today are no buggier than old releases, given the above it still results in people living with buggier releases, since we’ve removed a year of living under a stable OS. By the time the OS has shipped its .5 version and become rock solid, it’s just about time to upgrade yet again. The deal used to be that every other year you’d go through a few months of bug-time in exchange for new features, but this has now been compressed to be that every year you have to go through this process, which I personally find exhausting. This also effectively means that it’s harder to be the kind of person that waits for the bugs to be ironed out before upgrading because by the time the current OS feels good, the beta for the next OS is literally already out and it’s clear most of the work is being directed there.

This is the camp I’m personally in right now. I was waiting for High Sierra to calm down (given the particularly tumultuous security issues it had), but it’s now looking like I’ll just be skipping it altogether (this will be the first version of macOS I’ll skip).

>This also effectively means that it’s harder to be the kind of person that waits for the bugs to be ironed out before upgrading because by the time the current OS feels good, the beta for the next OS is literally already out

I realised this a couple of weeks ago when Mojave was showcased. I've got about 30 Macs here, mostly running Sierra, because of bugs and infamous security failures in the new OS that I held people back from upgrading, but now I'm thinking it might be stable enough to use, 10.14 is on the cards.

You're right, it's exhausting trying to keep up. Could not be more thankful that Ubuntu (our other platform) has LTS versions!!

Good point.

I'd be totally happy to go back to an 18-24 month update cycle.

Big structural changes every two years and point updates with feature releases (which would normally be in a new version) and bug fixes.

No need to try and wedge everything into an annual release, especially if it's still buggy or unfinished.

I think there are two dynamics operating in tandem to create the oft-voice antipathy toward macOS in these parts. They are:

1. People perceive the past through rose tinted glasses, so they remember past releases as being better than they actually were.

2. People notice the things which are going wrong more than they notice the things that are going right, so they think current releases are worse than they actually are.

I just miss the days when they named the OS releases after kitty cats. Snow leopards are adorable, but I don't feel nearly as much passion for a beach I've never been to.

Funny enough, biologists complain about the very same thing. Common wisdom is that biologists who study "charismatic mega-fauna" get traction with public opinion / may find easier funding streams than researchers who study small ugly things.

And as an aside, Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle had a snow leopard kitten this year. Snow leopards are indeed adorable, and I did think to myself about Apple scoring a win in having such an illustrious association.

And they have those ridiculous tails. Snow leopard tails are a thing of beauty.

That reminds me:

> the big cat in the OS's desktop pictures has some slight flecks of blood on its lower jaw, and its lower teeth are also slightly visible.

https://www.engadget.com/2010/03/30/10-6-3-update-makes-snow...

I agree, but I think they started running out of cats. Puma, Panther, and Mountain Lion are all distinct releases of MacOS, but they're the exact same species.

> 1. People perceive the past through rose tinted glasses, so they remember past releases as being better than they actually were.

So what's the explanation for why Snow Leopard specifically is being touted as being better than both previous and future versions? It's one thing if people said "it's gotten worse every release since Jaguar" (e.g. rose tinted glasses), but since people are referring to a specific release, I think this likely less the case.

I have a few theories.

- Snow Leopard was the last $99 upgrade, and I think people like to convince themselves purchases were worth it. That effect is entirely lost with free OS upgrades, I'm free to disparage them without feeling like an idiot for buying it.

- Many people in enterprise & education stuck with SL for longer than they usually would have on the server, because it was the last OSX with an actual server release. This ends up with a "people who know what they're talking about are sticking with SL" narrative that gets propagated sans the understanding of _why_ they kept it around.

- SL was the last release on physical media, which upsets the "they're turning my mac into a phone" narrative.

Interestingly, when Snow Leopard was current, everyone held 10.4 Tiger up as the canonical release in much the same way they later did SL. Snow Leopard wasn't cool until it was already dead. Part of me suspects later releases haven't been able to take this mantle simply because they don't stick around long enough to make a name for themselves. (Although Sierra is starting to get there, thanks to a crowd of people who are too scared of APFS to upgrade to High Sierra).

Snow Leopard was probably a local maximum, so it stands out in people's memory.

> I don't get the praise/hate online for different releases, or the narrative that Apple's software quality is turning to crap. It's too shrill to be genuine.

For example, its the introduction of new bugs in the Finder that started with Maverick and still haven't been fixed. Its not too shrill, it is the software version of the neglect we see with the hardware. Things just aren't being fixed and the OS is getting flaky. I am getting a little sick of filing radars with no response or fixes. I would imagine our Adobe classes are going to end up transitioning to Windows if this keeps up and that would truly suck.

Quality or rather attitude. Back then, each release felt like it had a meaning for the consumers. Time machine, quick look, better dock all somehow made it in a single update and Leopard was fine for me, never felt unstable and Snow Leopard even makes it faster and more lightweight. I was amazed how a newer OS could do that after using Windows for quite a while.

And today, I don't know what kind of difference I'm seeing from about the last 4 macOS releases except given OS names I can't even remember compared to simple animal names. I just update because apps stop working on older releases but not for the OS.

iBooks, iTunes Store, App Store, you name it, the quality is amazingly low and never gets better.

Just tells how the managements don't care to deliver quality products that I lost hope of them to put the quality back, just hoping they would just keep it at this level.

And they can't even keep up releasing all their hardware lineup like they used to, even let go of some good ones like routers and obviously I've stopped watching their keynotes as it's just boring these days.

Current attitude is not "make something good" but "keep investors feel good" but I guess everyone knew this was going to happen.

So, I wonder about this:

https://macperformanceguide.com/topics/topic-AppleCoreRot.ht...

I also think OSX have been less stable last versions. I need to kick Spotlight indexing almost each 1-2 weeks. I only note it when install a new app and after a while it fail to find it. Also small things here and there...

Agreed. Regarding why folks might not want to upgrade: for me the main reason is legacy hardware not performing well with newer OSes. For example I recently upgraded a 2012 Mac Mini to High Sierra, and the experience was unacceptably slow. Switching back to Lion, the overall experience feels snappy again. This has happened to me on both Macs AND iphones over the years. At least on a Mac it’s a little easier to hold off.

I had used Windows at school and home until '07, when I bought a 15" Pro. The J-Lab at college had a bunch of new G5 and I was tired of having to always hike there to work on stuff.

Anyway...

At some point, I decided to reformat the laptop as I had seen some weird behaviors after (incorrectly) uninstalling something. Fast forward 8 hours and I learn that Target Disk Mode exists.

10.5.2 Meh.

> It's too shrill to be genuine.

Such a horribly disingenuous way to dismiss the experiences of other people.

This is a particular pet peeve of mine [0]. It seems as though they wanted to add some new presence features and rather than build on top of what was there they decided to build a new DNS service from scratch. Something you should never do [1]

Hilariously this affected people more heavily invested in Apple gear than people maintaining a more heterogeneous set of technologies.

Thankfully rolled back now, but it showed such an epic level of ineptitude on so many levels (Design, Engineering, Product Management) that for me the spell was broken.

Another thing that irked me was the way they dumped iPhoto and replaced it with Photos. iPhoto had it's problems but I had a lot invested in it. I was using it to manage my photos, as you do, and after the transition to photos everything was just all over the place and has been ever since. I know iPhoto had its issues, but photos is hardly an improvement. With this I guess they demonstrated [1] as well.

And really, I just started off with one thing and other things are coming to memory now ... iTunes. What's that all about. Utter crap. Can I use an alternative? No.

Or iCloud messaging? Why can't I send and receive messages in my browser like I can with Whatsapp? They tried it briefly but had to roll back I suspect because their backend is crap and couldn't manage it.

And iMessage in general is just buggy and unreliable. Apple were far and away in the lead with iMessage and just messed it up.

I could go on.

All of this is notwithstanding of course that Mac OS for all its faults is still the best OS there is. Windows is closing the gap, but Apple at least will never shove updates down my throat for instance. I'd so love for Linux to be something I could use as my daily OS but it's just not there.

But for you to rubbish other peoples claims of poor software quality (especially when they're paying an ever increasing top dollar) is just crass.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/why-dns-in-os-x-10-1...

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

EDIT oh yeah and iOS 7 / Apple Maps

ANOTHER EDIT iOS 11 is lovely and has been a very welcome return to form. More please.

FINAL EDIT the spellcheck used to be good in iOS and is now nothing but a mess.

SORRY I KNOW I SAID THAT WAS THE LAST EDIT BUT THIS ONE'S A DOOZY https://www.macrumors.com/2017/11/28/macos-high-sierra-bug-a...

> Windows is closing the gap

Seriously? While Apple has totally slowed down to a crawl in terms of invention, Windows 10 is totally unbearable.

Poor flat design that looks like Linux's KDE from 15 years ago, control panel is all but a mess split in 2 locations and every option having "Advanced" button which in turn has more tabs and checkboxes and leads to another config which itself can have another "advanced" config, things are just a joke. And what's worse, third party apps inherit that attitude that I feel I'm in a maze using Windows. macOS apps, not so.

And I don't know how people can live with its crappy default font rendering. Touching Windows makes me feel I'm rewound back 15 years.

I use it daily and it’s fine as long as it gets a reboot every night ... which is needed rarely on my MacBook. I also like the flat UI and configuration is a mess, just like on the other two OSes

> At least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the middle of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could mention.

You left out the part where you ignored ample warnings that a reboot was needed for days in advance.

The forced update stuff can be a real pain even if no reboot is needed. Many updates cause high CPU usage, making work rather slow going. Some even do this during the downloading step, so they can cause you trouble even during your active hours.

Even if you disable this stuff with the Group Policy Editor, you still have to be careful, because if you click the 'you need updates' notification (perhaps to see which updates are ready) you approve them for installation sight unseen. The entire system is unfathomably user-hostile.

What was really fun in 7 was the weird state Windows Update would be in if it had not received updates in a long time. It would hog CPU and do nothing. You would manually have to download a couple key patches and apply them before Update would be able to connect and install anything else.

That was so frustrating too. I remember the update to windows update usually fixed it if I could find it.

I did have a lot of success letting Windows Update run overnight though. Then it would inevitably be stuck at 2% waiting for a button to get hit.

We've come so far.

> ample warnings

Ample warnings or not, this is unsatisfactory.

Wasn’t mine. It was the generic meeting room presentation machine.

Don’t care about what warnings were or weren’t ignored: the main lesson is that Windows will leave you in the lurch at the worst possible time.

Nothing makes for better tournament streams than having the update box pop up during grand finals, or watching the stream lag more and more because of an update installing in the background.

I don't know what the future will hold, but I do know the present is a pretty frustrating time for this type of stuff.

That sounds like a failure of the IT department then to properly maintain the machines. Enterprise Windows can be managed very differently than the consumer versions.

As prominent tech CEOs have discovered, ‘You’re doing it wrong’ doesn’t go down all that well as a defence.

I think a lot of it is people are just adverse to change.

https://medium.com/@cwodtke/users-dont-hate-change-they-hate...

This article doesn't say how it did, but that it did.

However, this is still an interesting piece of history. I didn't realize anyone considered any particular MacOS better than the others.

I've had several macs since 2012, and I always upgrade. Haven't experienced any particular issues I can remember.

So this whole thing was missed by me although apparently it was a big event for other people.

2012 was already into the decline years. Snow Leopard came out in 2009 and was replaced with Lion, in 2011.

Anyone who has used every version of OSX will tell you it's not a myth.

Although I agree it is mostly remembered because Lion was such an awful release and objectively a step backwards that took a good few more releases to finally recover from.

Hi, user of OS X from 10.2 to present. It’s a myth.

Snow leopard was not some mythical stable release without bugs. Hell it had the remove your home directory bug when logging in as a guest. I’ve personally had no real problems with the recent releases, I know a fair amount of people inmy camp too. Angry people are just more vocal.

I know there are a ton of hn posters that will disagree but this whole thing is like windows 2000 being the most stable release of windows. Or more recently windows 7.

But by the time they hit their final release of 10.6.8, it was pretty damn good. Then Lion came out with bugs left and right. You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting.

And while you personally may not have had any issues (and I also haven't had any huge complaints w/ Sierra+), it's not like they haven't had their fair share of badly embarrassing bugs:

- https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/10/macos-high-sierra-app-s...

- http://fortune.com/2017/11/28/apple-security-flaw-vulnerabil...

- https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/macos-high-sierra-plain-text-...

> You're comparing 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, but there were a bunch of improvements in between that you're omitting.

I don't recall where I omitted anything in my original post or compared 10.6.1 to 10.7.1, care to explain? And I'm not discounting that bugs exist, just that in my experience I've not hit any huge ones. And snow leopard also had its share of badly embarrassing bugs.

As mentioned in TFA, the home directory bug was fixed in 10.6.2. What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8?

> What badly embarrassing bugs exist in 10.6.8?

Hell if I know, the goal posts seem to be shifting into me having to explain every point release now. Thanks for the discussion but its back to work for me.

As I mentioned in my first reply, that's the final release of 10.6. Your first comment mentioned bugs that had already been patched long before the final release, which is what everyone is referring to when looking back fondly at Snow Leopard.

I think it may also have to do with release timing. Leopard to Snow Leopard was 24 months and Snow Leopard to Lion was 27 months. That gave time for the 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc patch releases to stack up.

Most people probably didn't upgrade until at least a few of those point releases had been out, after which they could have enjoyed almost two years before another major OS update was released. I think much of the fond memories revolve around these later versions, and there were probably plenty of people continuing to run 10.6.8 long after 10.7 was released.

Now MacOS is on a yearly cycle like iOS. Stability is probably still pretty good if you wait and upgrade until about the time the new OS is announced, but Apple definitely pushes users to update sooner than that so people are spending more time running on versions that are more fresh from a major release with major changes.

This. Apple is really good at iterating, and nobody gets it right the first time. The early "cats" had lots of time to mature (look at how long Tiger persisted, my personal favourite) and I think Apple should strongly reconsider the annual cadence to allow that to happen again for macOS. They just changed the whole filesystem, for crying out loud. That needs time to settle.

There's also the fact that Snow Leopard will run on any Intel Mac, and I think a lot of people remember how (necessarily) light on its feet it was by comparison with what followed.

I'm pretty sure they didn't develop the new file system between Sierra and High Sierra.

4 years internally is what I remember hearing, plus 1 year as a developer preview.

So, no, certainly didn't happen overnight.

Sure. But it wasn't user facing until then, and that's a big difference.

>angry people are more vocal

That is a big thing. Kinda like this mac book pro is fine as long as you don’t get a bad keyboard.

The 15" one I had at my previous job had graphics corruption issues (just big red — presumably untextured — rectangles all over the place), and I have to restart my current 13" one at my current job every couple of days because one of the thunderbolt ports will give up on outputting video on a regular basis (and won't recover until I restart). I also lose audio on this one every few days. I'll accept a dud as unlucky. Two in a row feels sloppy.

The keyboard is only one of many problems these laptops have.

An 8600M GT killed my '07 15" and I've sworn off discrete graphics ever since.

While the long-term plan for Apple appears to be to move everything to their own silicon, I wonder if we'll see a hardware refresh based on a 7nm AMD Ryzen chip between now and then. The integrated graphics on AMD seem to be relatively performant compared to Intel's, and I can't imagine AMD not having pretty good power characteristics at 7nm.

Maybe this is 2005 Me talking, but I simply don't trust AMD to do anything well. To be fair, both Intel and them have had high profile failures where the product either didn't work at all or didn't perform adequately (Itanium and Bulldozer).

The AMD I remember also had a tendency to over estimate performance and underclock parts, (1800+, anyone?) even if they could sell them for less.

It's this part that makes me think Apple wouldn't want to deal with them. For all of Intel's missteps, Apple choosing AMD because they are the cheaper alternative smells weird to me.

Myth, huh?

    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, major dev tool updates
    ~~~ wind leaves sails ~~~
    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
    ~~~ wind returns? ~~~
    2017 10.13 High Sierra:  HEVC, APFS, VR

On the upside, High Sierra was a release that lives up to the old standard. Hopefully that's a trend that will continue.

Can you explain how any of this pertains to a stability problem?

Cherry picking features added to each release is... a weird argument in this regard.

It doesn't. Apple releases were never bugproof. That part of the myth is counterfactual. The part that isn't counterfactual is that upgrades became much less attractive after the A team left for the iphone.

What makes you say that High Sierra lives up to the standard? Because it had more "under the hood" stuff? I think the Snow Leopard meme is also about perceived quality, not just where the updates occurred.

Also, apropos of nothing, when I was in my larval state and we walked uphill both ways to school, High Sierra was a file system, not an OS. My System 7.1 Mac has an extension to read them.

Through 10.6, people had good reasons to suffer through buggy upgrades. Post 10.6, they didn't. Apple delivered bugs at the same rate but noticeably fewer heavy-hitting, impactful, and technically excellent features. The attractiveness of upgrading plummited, leading to "Why not just stick with Snow Leopard?"

Lion, however was a slow, buggy resource hog that bought older Macs to their knees. 10.6.8 was, by comparison fantastic. Mountain Lion started fixing the damage.

Thing is, it's not about one or two large stand out bugs affecting a few. SL of course had bugs, all software has bugs.

But Lion and the next few versions after that had constant small issues, instabilities and glitches that became a background noise that made the entire period of using versions 10.7-10.9 frustrating.

Question is more like, has Apple ever made a OS without adding/breaking stuff but just made the predecessor better after Snow Leopard?

I think I can still feel at home using Snow Leopard as nothing significant has changed from users perspective.

I remember that bug, fun times. Of course, I think it wasn't just limited to Guest accounts (which nobody needs - get your own damn machine), which made it all the more insidious.

It was a nicer release, but all of the praise/hate for versions is a little too loud.

I specifically remember Snow Leopard doing one thing in particular wrong: it totally screwed up exposé. They removed the dynamic window positioning/sizing[1] and replaced it with a weird grid based system[2] that poorly utilized screen space and felt like the terrible Linux exposé ripoffs at the time.

For whatever its faults, Lion did fix this[3], so I was largely happy with it.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-mt/HT201741

[2] https://superuser.com/questions/118424/old-leopard-expose-on...

[3] https://www.cultofmac.com/94997/mac-os-x-10-7-lion-a-guided-...

I never got the point of F11 moving all windows so you could see the desktop. At that point, you probably have too many on the screen and would benefit from a second monitor.

Despite this, I actually really liked Dock expose and minimizing windows into the icon a la Windows.

Expose wasn't meant to look like that? Huh.

This is an excellent clickbait headline because the word "myth" in modern language has two distinct meanings (a popular belief; a falsehood). The article is about the earlier meaning (e.g., "the legend of Snow Leopard has steadily grown, its mythology spreading"), while people assume it's about the latter and get riled up.

(One HN comment here even uses the word in both senses in adjacent sentences!)

It is a myth (well, as much as a computer operating system can be), but that doesn't mean it's not true.

A myth typically refers to a popular belief unsubstantiated by fact.

Try reading his post again.

What do you mean? He says it's either/or. I'm saying it's both.

The main point was that the term can be ambiguous and it's not always both. The word "myth" is sometimes used synonymously with "creation story" or sometimes with "lie".

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth

and with regards to parent comment your point is what exactly?

The only Mac I ever owned was a Snow Leopard laptop. One by one the others in my team got Lion and Mountain Lion laptops, and I had to sit through their cursing every day while my battered old silver brick kept soldiering on. I think these days the battery is pretty well dead and the hard drive is on the way out but everything else is as solid as the day I bought it, albeit more covered in iron ore dust from the many mine sites I took it to.

Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly usable. Of course, it had bugs - no OS is perfect. But Apple made a wise decision. Leopard was a runaway success - the gorgeous UI with metal accents and its deep purple default background, well-established workflows and other aspects - and Apple just refined it, making it pure x86-64 (it performed much better on my MBP than Leopard with its lingering PPC support) and embracing open technologies (OpenGL and OpenCL especially) to increase performance, but leaving the UI alone.

Every release since has been trying to 'modernise' the UI, with extremely varied success. I recently got a Retina MBP and installed Sierra on it, and I use none of the new UI features. In fact, there are times I miss simple things like the 'lozenge' to switch a Disk Image window into a full Finder window. I hate the washed out, low-contrast, flattened look of the current OS. It staggers me that, in an era where we have a glut of processing performance on tap, the UI has less 3D elements than 10 years ago when you needed dedicated GPUs. There's no eye candy or anything that would make you step back and appreciate the thought and design that went into the interface; it all just blends together. Sure, it's not distracting, but I like clearly defined buttons that tell me where I can click. I like the UI to do exactly what it's told and not try to get me to change my ways (Siri, Launchpad etc.). And what the HELL is this obsession with Dark Mode?! I have seen zero useful reasons to upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave. The feature lists are wearing thin. Apple have long since run out of ideas for the OS on its own, but it seems they've also run out of ideas to copy from iOS, so their current approach is to make some superficial UI tweaks and call it a new OS. Maybe making the OS chargeable again would help - I actually bought Snow Leopard (still have the DVD at home, used it this year to build a VM!) and it's one of the most satisfying pieces of software I've handed over money for. Maybe the total loss of revenue from the OS division has sucked the motivation right out of them.

I loved Snow Leopard. It's been downhill ever since, and I did hear that Apple has been moving their MacOS development teams to work on iOS instead. I'm afraid it shows - I've just bought a new Windows machine, my first this century.

As a user of the latest versions of both macOS and Windows, I'll still take macOS any day. At the moment it is their hardware I am frustrated with, not their software.

After using macOS as main OS around Tiger, using Windows today is nothing but a source of frustration including third party apps with million options and menu items.

Can confirm, my 2010 Snow Leopard is still my main workhorse despite being used every day with demanding design programs, and replacing the battery / RAM once (and being dropped several times, imagine that).

At this point I'm honestly not sure what I'll replace it with - hoping to extend its lifespan for at least another 5 years which is ironically looking possible.

Is there any other release that gave users back as much hard disk space as SL?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/

The first version of OS X I ran was the beta that didn’t look much like the UI we know today. In those days I was a NetBSD user. The first public release of OS X was mana from heaven for me.

I think the addition of Expose (Panther?) was the high point for me in terms of OS X releases. The addition of Spotlight shortly thereafter marked the beginning of features that I started disabling either partially or wholly.

Now I’m not entirely comfortable running macOS as a daily driver simply because I know heaps of crap is turned on that I probably don’t want, and don't have the time or inclination to research the likely security implications.

We crossed a point a few years ago where I rediscovered free *nixen, and decided that it was easier to make Xubuntu do what I want than it was to make macOS not do what I didn’t want. I miss simple OS X.

There is only one issue I'm having with macOS or Mac OS X today, they still use 10.x and they had three wonderful possibilities to switch to 11:

Lion: Darwin 11. (Also leaving behind PowerPC) El Capitan: Simply remove the 10. High Sierra: Sync with iOS 11.

But Apple didn't do it.

On a serious note:

The other thing I really disliked was FileVault 1, which based on a sparse image file and was an horror to backup. And in Panther it was at first extremely unreliable. I think I lost some data back then. FV2 based on CoreStorage was much, much better. Which came with Lion btw.

For me Snow Leopard was significantly more buggy than Leopard.

The lesson here, if there is one: in sufficiently complicated software, every release is worse for someone.

10.6.8!!!

With marketing, cultism and people who has to somehow auto convince themselves and others about the reasons they have to pay more for the same thing PC owners have?

Are companies/people using Windows or Linux feeling less reliability? And more importantly, do they get to do work faster or not?

Somewhat unrelated to the article, but one thing I learned about all Apple products is this: Never upgrade their OS. Doing minor updates is fine, but any major version upgrade will doom the device.

My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is quite good about OS upgrades in general.

I don't think my iPhone was ever damaged by an update - I always migrated to a newer one before the newer OSes caused strain. I was one of those who held off on the initial releases of iOS 7 ..

But my god Yosemite in 2015 (again waited for it to "stabilise") on my 2014 MBP was an unholy shitshow.

My current OS actually stems back from the Public Beta that I ran on my G3. I've cloned the data from HDD to HDD/Computer to Computer and upgraded the OS every time, and it's currently on El Capitan (because my Mac Pro is no longer supported). I've never run into issues during an upgrade.

You surely must have done the "transfer my settings and apps" on the PPC->Intel transition. I can't imagine the HDD clone method working through the architecture change. Still, I'm impressed that settings haven't borked anything since then. There have to be a lot of stale plist values that aren't used any more, I'd guess.

Oh, I'm sure. I've used the migration tool when going from one mac to another (Specifically from G4 to Intel iMac in 2006) which might clean some things out. Looking at the plists in my ~/Libray, I have some dated as far back as 2001. I also still have my MacOS 9 installed on my main hard disk :-P

By doom I meant getting so slow it becomes unusable after a while.

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