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Wasn't a lot of Snow Leopard an exercise in removing old cruft from the PowerPC architecture, and the last release to support 32-bit Intel machines? From my perspective at the time, it was really meant to set up Mac for the next decade or so, which it did brilliantly.

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Mountain Lion dropped support for 32 bit kernel. I only know this because Apple didn’t provide a patch for first generation Mac Pro users, even though the CPUs were 64 bit and could run Mountain Lion just fine.

That's not how I remember it. In fact, Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release, I'd say. As explained in the article, that mythology of a stable release was formed over time later on.

I don't know what the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are, but I think the article paints a misleading picture by leaving unstated how polished 10.5.8 wasn't. Sure 10.6.0 had some new bugs due to landing major new under-the-hood technologies, but there were no serious regressions. It was a rare major release where you could install it on day one and not end up regretting it.

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.

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