The myth of Snow Leopard
rubenerd.au
rubenerd.au
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.
Thank you for admitting that.
> Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind
Also the last, apparently.
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.
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.
10.6.3 actually introduced a CFNetwork/NSURLConnection crash with HTTP 301 redirects that plagued many people including me and lasted way too many OS X updates afterward. (This was originally Radar 7816615, now FB6066729, see also https://openradar.appspot.com/7841731)
There was something else going on during that time period though.
Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.
Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.
Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.
I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since.
My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.
That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.
I mean, what software is bug-free? Fewer bugs is a big deal. Less-severe bugs is a big deal.
What was defined as a feature? The first new thing I noticed in Snow Leopard was that Quick Look could now preview Adobe Illustrator files (it was not the case in Leopard). I very much welcomed that, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature addition that would clear a high bar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's one of the first things I turn off.
Yes, I know about system 76 and framework, but they're not what I was looking for.
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.
• 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.
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.
This is why Apple nerds (like me) are hopeful that John Ternus will refocus the company. Steve said that companies that want to make good software should make their own hardware. I only learned that Alan Kay said that first when looking to make sure that I had this quote correct.
Alan Dye is gone. The guy who was completely unqualified to lead UI design is no longer in charge. Tim Cook will soon move to a new role. The business guy is stepping aside. An actual engineer with no business degree is gonna be in charge. Maybe things will become sane again. I hope so.
Fwiw, Apple nerds who care about UI design would enjoy the recent Talk Show episode (Daring Fireball, John Gruber, the Markdown guy) ep with Louie Mantia. He's a designer who expresses why Dye was unfit for the job in a satisfying way.
Just woke, probably typos and mistakes.
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.
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).
Likewise, if a fix requires a behavioral change that impacts third party developers, that fix may not feasible to deploy until the next release. Apple had some pretty fundamental things like Cocoa outline views broken for multiple years because the fix required API changes.
Is this true of operating systems for most people?
Personally I’d take macOS from 15 years ago (with security bug fixes and new hardware support, assuming modern apps still worked, but no new features) over today’s Windows any day.
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.
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.
People had bad experiences on Vista because they tried to run Windows Aero on 2001 hardware, and hardware vendors for once strong-armed MS into certifying their half-decade-old hardware as 'ready for Vista'.
Windows XP was when they started putting the activation bullshit in, which was just a little too much for privacy-brained me. I had migrated to Linux pretty much exclusively by then.
Windows XP was sufficiently reliable by SP1, sufficiently secure by SP2, and sufficiently prepared for an extended lifespan by SP3.
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.
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.
Of course 10.6 got better over time, and 10.6.8 was the best release of them all, and it was followed by Apple's answer to Windows Vista. But that doesn't mean 10.6.0 sucked.
For myself Snow Leopard holds a special place as the last "pure Mac" release and a culmination of a decade of Mac OS X releases. I skipped over Lion and Mountain Lion, finally getting back on the upgrade train with Mavricks, so I ran Snow Leopard for about four years.
So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster...
Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.
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.
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.
haha that‘s a nice nostalgic image. I remember installing it on a friend’s laptop with my DVD in a café, to „fix her macbook“.
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.
> Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. 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.
A lot of people want stability and polish. They get enshittification. I regard mobile app updates as new versions are usually worse TomTom (the free version - that replaced Amigo) is a good example. A major update took away the feature that most made me use it in the first place - it had full screen turn indicators you could see without looking at it directly (so not looking away from the road).
On the other hand its hard to think of a mobile app or website update that actually added anything I want recently. Things like Facebook certainly keep getting worse (especially for a group admin which is why I usually go on there). Banking websites mostly want to seem to push you to use the app.
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.
Those early MacBooks had 32-bit CPUs. Wonder if Snow Leopard was problematic on those, since that's when Apple started the transition to 64-bit, finalizing in Lion. Would still be bad if this were the reason, but might also explain why other people had a better experience.
Just because it's marked as "no feature" it doesn't mean it was a "no user changes" release.
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.
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. I have an M5 Max and it doesn't feel that good.
Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.