A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard | Hacker News Reader

A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard

morrick.me

137 pointsNaOH111 comments

Snow Leopard was the greatest OS update of my lifetime. That was the only year I went to WWDC and they were handing out the DVD as I was waiting in line. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES (except some support for MS Exchange). There is a concept -- release an OS that makes your machine more stable and faster -- nothing else. Rock solid OS. That was pinnacle of all OS updates.

Totally agree! I really hope Apple does another modern Snow Leopard type of update with no new features -- just optimizations. Although, going from Big Sur on an Intel Mac to an M1 Mac _felt_ similar -- everything is just snappy.

Remember Mojave?

Actually, Mojave was noticeably slower on my older Macbook Air. I suspect because they switched the UI to use Metal for everything.

I would have used High Sierra as the example.

Remember it? I'm still running Mojave on my iMac! I do keep it updated. I prefer the ability to run older 32-bit stuff, and have one old app I haven't upgraded.

Me also. I'm holding off because if I upgrade my scanner driver will be obsoleted and I'll have to buy a new scanner. I hate throwing away perfectly good hardware. When I have the time I'll try to set up a scanner station using a Raspberry Pi and some FOSS software to drive the scanner.

Have you tried VueScan? They seem to support plenty of scanners, including my Canon P208 [1] which required Canon's proprietary capture software before.

[1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/canon_p_208.html

I've recently upgraded to mojave from el capitan and i must say i hate it.

"Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES"

run that past me again please

User-facing, I assume

Yes -- there were a many new features "under the hood".

NO NEW FEATURES was totally marketing that just went along with not changing the UI. Like you said they added Grand Central Dispatch and Exchange support, they rewrote Finder in Cocoa, released QuickTime X, OpenCL support, and introduced the Mac App Store. They also made significant updates to BootCamp, Safari, and ported stuff to 64-bit. It also had a data loss bug with guest accounts that was later fixed in a point release.

I do think it ended up being a great release, but I don't attribute it to "no new features." I think being the 6th or 7th major release, 3rd with Intel support, 6 years of support, mixed with good release planning and engineering, and luck helped it be so beloved.

There were fewer new user-visible features, so they could focus on optimization and stability (which includes things like Grand Central Dispatch and rewriting Finder to use a modern API).

QuickTime X was a big deal, but it was probably the largest user-facing new feature—the Mac App Store wasn't added until a year after launch.

Mountain Lion, El Capitan, and High Sierra were all similar to Snow Leopard in their priorities.

Rewriting Finder is huge and risky! When they replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd it caused problems they eventually reverted it when Vint Cerf called Tim Cook to complain.

I might be misremembering, but I through I heard a story of some meeting where "no new features" was branded close to release. Not something decided early in the dev cycle. The feature list for Snow Leopard actually looks larger than Lion to me.

I think another factor was a shift in development. Leopard was $129 and Snow Leopard was $29 and the last released on a disk. Lion was $29, Mountain Lion was $19, and Mavericks and onward were free.

> Rewriting Finder is huge and risky! When they replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd it caused problems they eventually reverted it when Vint Cerf called Tim Cook to complain.

But it's not the size, it's the focus, right? Rewriting Finder, without adding any additional capabilities, reduces technical debt and makes Finder faster and more stable. Adding QuickLook to Finder doesn't do any of those things, it just allows you to use QuickLook.

I have another theory though, and it's not the price—Apple has plenty of money—it's the development cycle. Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard had several years of life before they were replaced. Every OS since Lion has been replaced within a year.

> I heard a story of some meeting where "no new features" was branded close to release. Not something decided early in the dev cycle.

I hadn't heard this story, but I wonder if both could be true. The roadmap was probably planned early on, but the narrative could have been chosen later.

You can imagine an alternate universe where Steve Jobs walked on stage and announced "Snow Leopard comes with a brand new Finder, and it's better than ever!"

NO NEW FEATURES was indeed marketing. There were many new features.

However, as your list shows, the vast majority of those features were under the hood improvements that had little to no user interface changes.

And that’s what Apple meant by no new features. Their work in Snow Leopard was entirely focused on improving the underpinnings of Snow Leopard through both bug fixes and infrastructural changes.

While it looks dated, SL has a far more intuitive UI, in my opinion. I don't recall any major issues with this release. It seemed to "just work." Big Sur seems like a toy by comparison.

An anecdote, I still remember installing Snow Leopard on my Polybook; it was the first OS update since switching to a Mac. I received the physical delivery since it was still distributed by disc, so I left my house. I was able to install it a few hours later while waiting on an appointment sitting in the car, all while on battery power! It was like magic.

I agree Big Sur is a big step back. They've changed all the icons in System Preferences again, and the new sound-levels UI in the menubar is very confusing.

For me SL was one of greatest release of OS X.

It's so easy and sleek that i miss good old times!

Agreed. It’s an odd thing to say, but I’ve been using Macs since the early days, and something about SL felt like OS X had finally arrived—like the platform had reached the point where Apple wanted it to be.

Not that the earlier versions were notably bad or anything, but something about them still felt new and experimental. I remember thinking Snow Leopard was the point at which X graduated to “the new normal”, for lack of a better way of putting it.

I actually like the look of Big Sur, but the bugs... oh god the bugs.

That new notification center looks real nice. Shame my first experience with it has been it repeatedly hanging, gobbling up RAM and CPU cycles, and generally not displaying notifications.

(Extra fun if it hangs while notifications are still on screen; then they just sit there forever. 'pkill NotificationCenter' has been my friend lately.)

I get every notification double. And they took away the snooze options on calendar notifications but they are still there for reminder notifications.

It’s kind of interesting because in the Snow Leopard era you didn’t have OS level notifications but you had Growl. And the Growl API was extremely well supported, and arguably better supported because it wasn’t limited to App Store apps.

Further, Growl allowed the user to customize look and feel, persistence, the types of notifications, etc which allowed you to create a notification system that was far more effective than anything available on the Mac today.

It’s easy to argue that 12 years later notifications on Macs is worse than what it was in the late 2000s.

I’m amazed at how clear each UI element is from the background. Borders are apparently deemed uncool by today’s standards.

In pretty much every other discipline, we would engage in objective discussion about it.

Also, why do we need trends in Design? Borders, separators, visible scrollbars have a particular era they belong to like fashion or music? It makes no sense. I can understand color palettes and such as part of an era's esthetic. We can take creative liberty there.

It would be fun to interview the director of UX/UI at Apple and ask them why is 2013 UI worse than today? What specifically is wrong with 1990’s UI? What about 1980’s?

The ever shrinking and disappearing UI chrome is a trend that drives me crazy. Windows 10 programs essentially have no borders anymore which makes overlapping windows much more difficult to discern. Then there’s the design trend of hiding things like buttons and borders until you give it keyboard or mouse focus which is awful for discoverability. Then there’s the trend of disappearing scroll bars.

This article showed just how much craftsmanship and thought there was in earlier versions of Mac OS. Sure there was plenty to grouse about (even though much of the maligned OS X skeuomorphism didn’t seem as present here) but a lot of the fundamentals were extraordinary.

IMO, the only truly skeumorphic releases of OS X are Lion and Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard and Mavericks use textures from the real world, but rarely try to actually imitate objects.

No one outside of designers had even heard the word skeumorphism until Apple had that ridiculous iCal UI change that wasted a ton of UI space on nothing but looks.

To be fair, it wasn’t the first or even the worst skeumorphism from Apple (arguably early versions of DVD player that were skeuomorphic to the extent that volume controls emulated a knob, that had to be circled by the mouse to change, from what i remember) but skeumorphism was used fairly benignly for the most part by Apple.

I really miss Snow Leopard and the direction things were going back then. It felt like an advanced operating system that was easy to use. Modern iterations of MacOS feels more like they're trying to make it look good, while making the interface "simpler". Simpler as in showing fewer UI elements and settings, but if you want to actually use those elements and change those settings, it's many steps back.

Back in the day operating systems had advanced features for those who needed them.

Nowadays everything is optimized for idiots and functionality that requires more than 2 brain cells to operate is actively being removed, and replaced by liberal amounts of whitespace.

This isn't specific to Mac even. Windows (and to a certain extent Linux with Gnome 3) is also affected.

I once administered an office where all the machines ran Snow Leopard, which meant I had plenty of time that would normally go to user support available for more interesting skill development. Best OS of all time.

Then came Lion and every secretary wanted to kill someone because of the stupid "Save As" alterations.

"Open document, make changes, print, discard document changes" no longer worked. This error was bad.

At least they added it back in Mountain Lion! And with that refinement in place, I really do prefer how saving is handled.

Preview, where PDFs are opened, continues the broken behavior.

Oh yes! That’s why I hated Lion and it was basically unusable for me.

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was Apple did that took me from absolutely loving the OS after Snow Leopard to making it unusable after Lion.

For me, personally, my Mac still had a hard disk and not an SSD, so features like the auto save and restore windows on boot, which meant you couldn’t easily clean up state led to the computer also becoming unusable slow.

> Two usable browsers in Snow Leopard are: Firefox 45.9.0ESR, Opera 25.0.1614.71

Ew, no, don't do that! Use InterWeb, which is compatible with many more websites, and gets security updates. https://randommacstuff.blogspot.com/p/interweb-browser.html

On 10.7 – 10.9, you can actually use a branch of Chromium. It's unofficial, but completely up-to-date, and will work with every site. It's my daily driver. https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think macOS/Mac OS has added much in the way of UI enhancements for desktop usage since 10.6.

And by desktop usage, I mean, literally, using a computer on a desk with a mouse and keyboard.

They have absolutely made some nice enhancements when using a laptop with a trackpad. And obviously there’s many under-the-hood improvements. But in terms of old-school I-have-a-mouse grey-beard users like me? Meh.

This, of course, makes sense as a priority, given they sell so so many laptops.

It is a little disappointing seeing the utilities folder populated with the same dusty apps they were 20 years ago. I don't want them to go away—I want new stuff. Give me features and more tooling without feeling like something is being taken away in the process.

I found it weird they removed the network utility app. Doesn't seem like a complicated app to keep up to date.

Sure, you can still use the terminal commands but it was nice to use a gui.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/network-utility-depreca...

It works if you copy the Catalina version of Network Utility over to Big Sur.

They added a lot of features in 10.7/8 that I really like. Autosave is the biggest one for me—particularly alongside the integrated revision history—and notification center is super convenient. Remember when everything had to use Growl?

I would agree with you if we were talking about 10.9, though.

> Remember when everything had to use Growl?

And yet Steam and Microsoft Teams still roll their own notifications, for some reason.

Steam rolls their own everything. Controllers don't work right for apps launched from steam unless you enable the overlay, if you launch outside of Steam they work perfectly. They even seem to roll their own window management as on Linux if you mark a chat as "always on top", then focus another steam window that is partially under it it and click on the overlapped area it handles the click with the window that isn't focused. They also had huge issues with mapping clicks on hidpi setups but I think those are mostly fixed now.

Growl was excellent. Nearly every decent app used it (besides there weren’t restriction on only App Store apps being able to leverage it) and it allowed the user far more customixability in terms of look and feel and persistence, etc.

There's been a bunch of quality of life improvements over the years. Dark mode, file renaming by clicking the window title, Mission Control is more feature rich than Exposé, Desktop Stacks, native notifications come to mind. There's been a lot of practical security improvements too, with the permissions system and FileVault full disk encryption. By nearly all accounts APFS is a much better file system than HFS.

There's a lot to be said for Snow Leopard's simplicity and refined design, and plenty to complain about in Big Sur. But there have certainly been some improvements over the past 10 years. Even for grey beards, I'd say.

Maybe it was just me, but there was a lot of talk and excitement that the desktop metaphor and WIMP had kind of plateaued and something new might happen. There were a lot of interesting things tried, but the new UIs for smartphones were the only things that caught on. The desktop kind of stopped changing.

Magic Mouse 2 is where the real improvement is. It's a joy to use, even though it's sharp edges really suck for prolonged use. Hopefully they fix that in the next iteration, also it's a bit too heavy.

Amen. I bought my iMac with Leopard, wanting to believe in that it would be the "Apple Unix Workstation", and Snow Leopard was one of those rare things -- an upgrade, which was sold as a performance and reliability release, not a feature release, which was noticeably faster for me, and gave me great confidence in the whole platform.

It's been in steady decline ever since, with iPhone and iPad stealing the show. But now we have 1000 USD monitor stands, so there's that.

At the time it was a great UNIX workstation. Since then they've locked down so much that it no longer really is. But at least other DEs like KDE and Gnome are now usable.

Oh my god.

In later Mac OS versions, scroll bars are set by default to appear only based on mouse/trackpad movement, which is a pity; many users probably don’t realise they can have scroll bars appear permanently, so they don’t have to time the mouseover action for the scroll bar to appear and then hope they’ll manage to grab it when they want to quickly scroll down a long list of elements.

This... is me. For years I've been frustrated by recent versions of MacOS and the problem of the disappearing/impossible to grab scroll bar. And only by reading this article did I learn that you can make it stick around permanently.

I guess, good for Apple for making that possible? But, holy crap, way to not communicate the existence of that capability to even sophisticated users.

You’re not alone. This caught me by surprise last year too.

Why do you need to grab the scroll bar?

Personally I find it is incredibly helpful to be able to see the scrollbar at all times, even if I primarily use a mouse scroll wheel, trackpad gesture, or keyboard for scrolling. The slight bit of horizontal screen space it takes in every window is a trivial cost in comparison to the value of knowing how tall the scroll is and where the viewing window is currently scrolled.

(Note, it is also more effective to grab the scroller and drag it along the track vs. using other mouse/keyboard gestures in cases where the scroll is extremely tall or wide – anything more than about 20x the window size – and you want to move precisely to one particular part. I find this especially helpful when reading books or other long documents.)

I wish user interface designers looked for more ways to provide unobtrusive extra information in parts of the screen I am not otherwise using.

I scroll log files and extracts a lot. Scrolling page by page would be craziness.

I think the lack of scroll bar goes with an assumption of a trackpad. It also gets rid of most of the context clues that a page goes off the screen or how long a page is. Without a trackpad (ignoring search), it's really difficult to scroll through a very long document or log.

While some elements of new UI definitely require improvements to OS underpinnings (e.g. the idea of adding gradient blurs everywhere), the vast majority do not.

Why can’t we have OSes layered better so that the “core” can evolve but these “design”-of-the-week changes can remain compartmentalized and potentially ignored from one release to the next?

To a large extent, nothing ought to break if you simply allow users to choose from any of the “looks and feels” of the past few years while updating the lower-level OS to be the latest. It also means you could have different security policies, e.g. prefer to auto-update more at the lower layers and auto-update less or never at the GUI scale.

And, any “correct” application is somewhat layout-agnostic anyway: technically with various Accessibility settings you can already change the look and feel and behavior a lot, and apps will not work quite right if they don’t respect these settings. There is not much difference between those changes and any Apple “design” from one year to the next.

I'd like the underpinnings to stop changing so much too! I want my OS to be (1) stable, and (2) performant, and macOS has gone backwards on both counts. The M1 is speedy for sure, but that's hardware.

I just want Apple to stop making changes. Microsoft too. Push security updates, fix bugs, and back off. We've been making desktop OS's for 30 years, and we've pretty much figured them out at this point. There's no reason to switch things out from under me every 12 months, all it seems to do is make everything less stable.

I enjoyed that -- Apple's UI shifts have been subtle (mercifully) but I still think that there was a real high water mark around 10.6 and later to 10.10 too. I haven't upgraded to BigSur.

I remember how on Snow Leopard opening the lid of my laptop instantly showed the password prompt. What are more recent versions doing that it takes two or three seconds to show a text box?

Probably checking that SignIn.app's signature is valid

From what I remember when Big Sir dropped they're doing all sorts of weird network @#$@#$ - you turn off Wifi and unplug and they open instantlier.

For what it's worth, the M1 Macs are instant-on. Paired with an Apple Watch to unlock, I frequently open my MacBook and just stare at my background (I hide icons/menu/dock) waiting for the prompt, not realizing it's already logged in and ready to go.

There has only been one UI change since Snow Leopard that I would consider to be an improvement, and that is the option to enable dark mode. Big Sur reminds me of Duplo Legos.

Snow Leopard doesn't need dark mode—I'm actually not sure what it would look like. The UI makes use of a wide array of tones, many of which are quite dark.

Finder's background is white by default, but you can change it to whatever color you want. TextEdit and iWork use white backgrounds because they're supposed to be printable. iWeb uses mostly dark backgrounds. Most other apps are mostly a neutral gray.

Dark mode is a bandaid to cover up the fact that modern macOS has too little contrast to begin with. You can make Mojave either too light or too dark, but both options suck.

(I meant to say iLife—the whole suite—not iWeb. Not sure how I messed that up.)

You can go into the accessibility panel in system preferences and increase the contrast and remove transparency, both of which aid readability and interaction.

Yes, but it makes the UI look even uglier. :( Whereas the pre-Yosemite design had high contrast and actually looked good.

I still keep a machine running Snow Leopard, these days it's mostly relegated to playing old games that never got ported to Intel since it was the last OS that supported Rosetta.

I've been using Mavericks as my main OS since March. It's a tad newer than Snow Leopard, but not by much, and I've modified it to be even more Snow Leopard-like. As you might imagine, I've run into many software compatibility issues, and I need to be extra cautious about security. But on the whole, it's been a huge improvement.

The biggest difference is the contrast. Mavericks's UI uses a wide variety of lights and darks grays, which I find both easier on my eyes and more comfortable to use. In Mojave, application windows would blur together somewhat, becoming messy and hard to work with. I can't quite explain it, but Mavericks's higher contrast UI keeps the windows separated, so I'm able to track them with less brain power.

I can also use Applescript and Automator without being interrupted by incessant permission prompts. I can activate the Dashboard from anywhere, to check my calendar, notes, etc without breaking my flow. And day-to-day, I just encounter a lot less general glitchiness. Mail doesn't randomly make itself the frontmost window, and random Apple processes don't start suddenly consuming CPU.

I like it here. I have no plans to leave.

I vastly prefer Mavericks’ look to that of Snow Leopard. It’s much more refined and less dark. It can handle HiDPI screens correctly too, which is a stumbling block I’ve encountered running Snow Leopard in a VM.

I generally agree—Mavericks's visuals are more refined, whereas Snow Leopard a tendency to look alternately too plain or too gaudy, depending on the area. But there are certain elements I greatly prefer in Snow Leopard. The darker window chrome is one of them—it adds even more contrast—as are the larger traffic light buttons and colorful Finder sidebar icons.

Not coincidentally, I've changed all of these on my own Mavericks machines to match Snow Leopard.

My first Mac was the 2010 MacBook that came with Snow Leopard. It had a 10 hour battery life, and a decent keyboard. I upgraded the RAM, and I replaced the optical drive with another hard drive, then installed OS X in a RAID1 configuration. These are things nobody could say about a MacBook sold today.

> Oh look, from here you can also add it to your Reading List. Why exactly can these actions be found under a ‘Share’ menu?

Most people think this is a “share” button, as that’s what they use to share content, but it’s really an “action” button: that’s what it’s called in the system. It’s a button that lets you perform actions, some of which may be “share using another service” but some may be “perform some arbitrary thing on this content”. It’s sort of a hamburger menu for things you can do.

It's the icon that everyone else uses for "share". It's the icon Apple used exclusively for share for years, training all of their users in the process. If Apple would like everyone to start thinking of it as a hamburger, they should change the icon to a hamburger.

I don't disagree with many of his points. Snow Leopard was built when Apple was firing on all cylinders. It was a very solid release where everyone was doing good to great work.

BUUUUT-

Big Sur, while not perfect, is damn good to me. The UI is more consistent, if not more friendly. Compared to say, Snapchat, (which seems to build functionality only to befuddle non teens so that they can hide their activity) Big Sur is downright amazing.

I dont think that we should stray from concise, clear, and discoverable UI/UX. But I also dont think we should stop at what we all think was the best and never change. Keep in mind that even 60, 70, 80 and 90 year old users who never could deal with computers in the past are able to work iPads and iPhones now. My mom is in her 70s and uses her iPhone 7 for all her computing needs. To me that means we can push users a bit to adapt to newer UI standards.

Again, Snow Leopard was great- no disputes here. Big Sur is not perfect. But its better in my experience than Catalina, Mojave, heck even going back to the Lion OSes. I was pretty much disappointed to downright irritated on the first releases of say 10.8 to 10.15. I really expected Big Sur to render half of my software unusable. Fortunately it wasnt even 5% of my software that had a problem.

Many reference this OS in the past tense, but there are few reasons not to still use it today. If you are not going online or are behind a NAT, if you only browse your own websites (and HN) it's a perfectly capable OS, as are many other amazing, capable OSes and other programs released in the past.

Example: For any serious writing, I boot up my Windows Me virtual machine and open up Word 97, which, in my not so humble opinion, is still light years ahead of anything else available to me today in terms of speed and UI polish. Plus, I'm just used to it and feel comfortable with it.

When I'm done writing an essay, I open up IE6 (or Netscape 4, or Opera 4) and paste it into my local blog instance. Or I can go straight to my public blog and post it there, since I don't care about doing it over plaintext HTTP.

I believe that retro-computing is about to skyrocket, driven not just by nostalgia and comfort, but also all the design anti-patterns in today's software applications and Web services.

(If you really care about HTTPS over the network, I'm sure there's a way to set up an SSL stripping proxy locally, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet. #lazyweb)

> (If you really care about HTTPS over the network, I'm sure there's a way to set up an SSL stripping proxy locally, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet. #lazyweb)

On Snow Leopard specifically, I made an installer which sets it up for you. :)

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fixing-https-issues-on-...

Nice, thank you for sharing that!

I am not using Snow Leopard at this time, but thanks to you I am a little bit closer to setting it up myself.

Snow Leopard was incredible. At this point apple needs 2 or 3 consecutive bug fix releases for each platform. Every time a new os comes out I now dread upgrading to it for fear of what will stop “just working”.

At this point I don't even update the OS from what the machine comes with beyond security updates. It seems like in the last decade there hasn't been a lot worth upgrading for in terms of user experience, since they invented spaces (and subsequently made it worse by switching from a perfectly good multidirectional grid of desktops to a bidirectional selection that takes more time to use). Usually something ends up more annoying or worse in subsequent updates.

A shame really, I used to look forward to OS X releases. Now I almost dread them knowing future hardware will be saddled to that OS.

Thats a good point, sticking with the OS the machine shipped with. I was on a sierra/high sierra machine for a long time and was recently forced to upgrade to Catalina. What a hateful experience. Everything I use on a daily basis as a developer broke. The worst was my oracle instant client which was now being stiff armed by the os every 10 ms when I tried to run it. I had to go in and open settings > security > allow some .so file to run. Rinse and repeat like a dozen times. What a joke.

I'd really like another "Snow" release right about now. I generally don't mind Big Sur's look, feel and function too much, but there's still quite a few bugs and the overall UI responsiveness and visual smoothness often leaves a bit to be desired.

The M1 is great, but I think Apple has left some potential on the table. Given how they perform today with Big Sur, I'd really like to see what they could do given a macOS release focused (almost) entirely on stability and performance enhancement.

“The difference between the user interface of Disk Utility in Snow Leopard and Disk Utility in Big Sur can be summarised like this: one is functional, the other is pretty.”

Forget just Disk Utility, this is an apt metaphor for an OS comparison as a whole.

As much as Craig Federighi et al. say they still love the Mac, I wonder how true that is. Does anyone have any detailed/insider information on this transformation of Mac OS from “the power of Unix, but user friendly” to “iOS, but with a trackpad”?

While I enjoyed OSX SL a lot, I believe this update was the one that modified Exposé/Mission Control to use a neat grid for every window, instead of shrinking all of them and keeping their relative size. This hampered the feature greatly for me, and am very glad they reverted it.

Exposé/Mission control + hot corners are what keep me sane re: window management.

But I with Apple would slow their releases and spend a whole release fixing bugs, since I feel like they're getting out of hand.

I felt that there was a similar U-shaped curve for the classic Mac system as well. I started using Macs around the time of System 4 (when the System and the Finder had separate versioning schemes). For me, the peak of elegance and usability was reached at System 7. It was downhill after that (through OS 8 and 9).

Maybe there's a general principle at work. Systems always change with time, but after a certain point, change becomes less for improvement and more for its own sake.

Skeuomorphism >> Fisher Price

I didn't like the skeuomorphic appearance, but to each their own. I despised the skeuomorphic behavior though. Limiting an app's functionality to that of its real-world counterpart was a God-awful trend of horribleness. For instance, here's an article about how much Lion's Address Book app sucked: https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/

If a future version of macOS made the icons and app background textures photorealistic again, fine, so be it. I might think it was ugly, but I'd keep using it. If that same version brought back a Calendar app that only let you go to the next or previous month's view because that's how a real calendar works, I'd heave my laptop out the window and switch back to Linux.

Lion was an all-around dog, pretty much the worst OS X release with the possible exception of Catalina. Amazing how it followed on the heels of something as great as SL.

I think Lion is the a large part of the reason Snow Leopard is remembered so fondly. It's a great release, but not quite as good as people remember.

And, Apple was able to course correct very quickly with Mountain Lion and Mavericks, which I really do love.

In fact, I think something similar is happening today with Catalina and Mojave. Mojave was never a particularly good release, but Catalina is just so bad...

The thing I most appreciated about skeuomorphism was that it had a high skill ceiling. A mediocre graphic artist's designs could be ugly, and often were, but a good graphic artist's designs could be positively delightful. The Mac OS X green glowing battery and metallic hard disk come to mind. Aqua had a good run before it overstayed its welcome. I'll gladly put up with a few bad designs if it means that I actually have something to look forward to now and again. I live for the pleasant surprise. Minimalism was a godsend for bad artists, but the flip side of that coin is that none of it is ever particularly good, either. It's one big sea of shrug, and to my taste that's worse than diamonds-and-dirt. But to each their own.

I'll grant you that skeuomorphism as a constraint on functionality was a consistently bad idea, but I'd argue that minimalism as a constraint on functionality is consistently even worse. Apps either Just Work or Just Don't. I've been on the "lol screw you, user" side of this many times, but I used to write it off as just the new incarnation of poor error reporting until the day I was working on a wireless product and my assigned UX guy hid my "Connection Failed" message behind an indefinite spinner. Not one that only popped up when the connection failed, mind you. The only way to tell if configuration was happening or if it was stalled from a failed connection was to know how long it was supposed to take and kill it if it took too long. What if you didn't have this knowledge, but would otherwise be capable of diagnosing a connection issue if you had a hint that the connection was the problem ? Too bad, so sad. Just Doesn't Work. Ugh.

Hard to choose between Tiger and Snow Leopard as my favorite OS X release. Both were stellar.

I still miss Tiger's Spaces implementation. I also remember exactly which quarter I put my apps in.

Turns out it was Leopard. Still loved it.

I miss the welcome videos. 10.3 introduced me to Royksopp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uzNyiODsw

I miss the Snow Leopard 10.6 design dearly.

When I updated to 10.8 Mountain Lion, I gained Messages (iMessage desktop) and Notes, but I lost Web Sharing. Now I have to install Apache myself, and it often breaks when I update the OS.

I updated to 10.9 when I got a 2014 Retina 15" MBP. Then I lost the ability to sync Notes and Safari Bookmarks to my iPhone over USB (I don't use iCloud). iTunes 11 broke the browser view, so I still downgrade to iTunes 10.6.3 (even on Mac OS 10.13).

I updated to El Capitan 10.11 when I upgraded my SSD from 512GB to a 2TB SSPOLARIS. That's when the redesigned Finder really hit me, and I've never been comfortable with it. There's a lag when creating a new folder and typing the name, which often means I get "untitled folder" and start navigating to another folder. The redesign of iCal pushed me towards an old version of BusyCal, and I have to use a locally-hosted calendar server. I lost Calendar USB sync to my iPhone.

I needed High Sierra 10.13 when I upgraded my SSD again to a 4TB Sabrent Rocket, to use the NVME driver. It was quite some effort to avoid using APFS. I want to be able to mount my SSD over Target Disk Mode if/when things go wrong.

As far as I know, the latest versions of Music (no longer iTunes) don't even support syncing apps. I also heard some bad things about Time Machine.

The main reasons I like Mac + iPhone are:

Mac: MagSafe, AppleScript, Office

Both: iSync USB, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Music, Bookmarks, Photos, Wiki2Touch, Skype

iPhone: MyWi, Re-restore, Jailbreak, PHP/lighttpd

The things I lack on iPhone are: SD card reader, USB host with drivers (mount someone else's phone), Removable battery (but Third Rail case is good). No Android phone has tried to address these, and most have obscenely large screens (I like the 3.5" on my iPhone 4S).

I've had to use Windows 10 at work for the last month, but it's unpleasant. Put a folder in the Recycle Bin and want to recover one file? Nope, you have to restore the whole folder, copy out that file, and delete it again. Scrolling Excel on a Dell Precision 7550? The screen glitches out with black bars. Type accented characters like é? Only with charmap.exe, slowly. Safely remove USB? Multiple presses. I made a lot of AutoHotKey scripts, but it's a struggle. So I'm not changing to Windows any time soon, but I'm disappointed in the way Apple has gone, and wish that Linux might one day catch up to Snow Leopard levels of usability and design.

> Type accented characters like é? Only with charmap.exe

The way I did this back in elementary school was by memorizing Alt codes. é was Alt+0233. I remember one of the schools I went to had little placards taped under the monitors with an Alt-code reference. If you're like me and have keyboards without a number pad, this isn't an option and you're stuck with charmap.exe.

These days you can use the US International keyboard map and use the grave or apostrophe key before hitting a vowel. Much more intuitive. Annoying when you want to type something like "c'est", however. You have to press Space after ' so it doesn't accent the e.

macOS is much more elegant.

Big fan of being able to just use the X11-style Compose Key sequences via https://github.com/SamHocevar/wincompose

And the upstream (en_US anyway) sequences it provides by default: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11/plain/nls/en_US...

> When I updated to 10.8 Mountain Lion, I gained Messages (iMessage desktop) and Notes, but I lost Web Sharing. Now I have to install Apache myself, and it often breaks when I update the OS.

They didn't remove Web Sharing, they just removed it from System Preferences. Apache is still installed by default and can be enabled from the Terminal. `sudo apachectl start`

I'll never forget the 'update' from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard that completely dropped the previously perfectly working Bluetooth addressbook/SMS/taking phone calls integration with a slew of bluetooth capable feature phones of the time, because the iPhone that was released just before simply didn't have the required capabilities in its software.

I've not moved away as the Unix-underpinnings combined with a mass-market UI have only recently been replicated with WSL2, and having mass-market UI really helps with not having to bother with as much stuff as you generally had to when running Linux or other Unixen on the desktop, and I want to get stuff done dammit.

I’ve been waiting for a stability release of macOS for YEARS. A return to Snow Leopard.

Alas.

Mountain Lion, El Capitan, High Sierra? They weren't as good as Snow Leopard but they did follow the same philosophy—very few user-visible features, focus on under-the-hood improvements and stability.

IIRC each release had its controversies. Maybe not Mountain Lion but I seem to recall wireless issues and MDNS responder (or whatever the acronym was).

But so did Snow Leopard! It literally erased people's hard drives!

I do not think High Sierra is as good as Snow Leopard—if I did, I'd be typing this on High Sierra instead of Mavericks. But High Sierra was a stability release.

Oh wow! I had no idea it erased drives.

All right, I stand corrected. Still, macOS could stand to have a stability release now. We have the cool redesign, make it stable.

If curious: https://9to5mac.com/2009/10/12/apple-aware-of-rare-snow-leop...

I was borderline shocked we didn't get a "Sunny Catalina" release, after all the problems it had. I guess Apple was too deep into macOS 11 changes to switch course.

Thanks for the link, what a weird bug.

Big same re Catalina.

I’m pretty sure erasing hard drives was a risk with every OSX release until recently and wasn’t specific to Snow Leopard.

Edit: To be clear, I don’t mean that every OSX release had this particular bug. But nearly every OSX release usually had at least 1 “you’ve lost all your data and your system is unusable” type of bug when updating.

Ah, the good old times when Apple actually followed their own HIG.

Apple has really gone backwards in UI quality. It's so sad.

If I remember correctly wasn’t this the version which had to cool dance style intro music? I could reinstall for only that

I loved all the old welcome videos! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uzNyiODsw

Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X I recommended to anyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com