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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.

This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.

What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.

What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.

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Focusing on changes "under the hood" instead of flashy new user-visible features was the entire point of that release, it's not a myth at all.

> Focusing on changes "under the hood" instead of flashy new user-visible features was the entire point of that release

Yes.

> it's not a myth at all.

The myth is that no flashy new user-visible features meant that Snow Leopard was a "stable" release. It wasn't a stable release, any more so than any other major new OS version. Snow Leopard became stable over time, after many minor bug fix releases.

Note the specific words I was replying to: "macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release."

macOS doesn't need any new major OS updates. Snow Leopard didn't help. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was in fact much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8 preceding it. What macOS needs is a long series of minor bug fix releases.

This is crucial: as soon as you acknowledge that 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8, the whole idea that "we need another Snow Leopard" goes out the window.

The old saying was you never run a X.0 release. You let all of the other "testers" to run it, and wait for the X.1 release to follow. I've even seen it annotated to not running an even version number.

X.1 isn't so great either.

Yeah, each OS version is much better a year after release than at release. If they had a two year release cycle, you could spend most of your time on a stable version of the OS as long as you weren't installing the new major version right away. With a one year cycle, you're upgrading to the new buggy thing shortly after the previous one got to a decent state.

Unfortunately as an iOS developer just not upgrading isn't an option - Xcode drops support for the previous version of macOS a few months after the release, and submitting to the app store requires using recent versions of Xcode. You can lag at most about a year behind.

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