Snow Leopard is Apple's XP

computerworld.com

6 points·kunai··6 comments

I am a faithful upgrader but I can't think of one thing I do with Mountain Lion that I couldn't do with Snow Leopard.

Actually, now I think about it, its about the same between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 5. No real value, just new shiny.

I don't know about you, but my iPhone 4 was feeling pretty sluggish doing normal everyday stuff in iOS by the time I upgraded to the 5. That said, I have used a friend's 4s and it was also quite a bit more fluid than the 4. Between that and LTE, I think there was quite a bit of value though I could see why people probably wanted more than just a performance boost and a slight physical upgrade.

Built-in Full Disk Encryption (FileVault 2) was really the only big OS X innovation since Snow Leopard in my opinion. It made making a notebook computer's data safe against theft with minimal frustration.

I don't think this will be a problem. Apple sells more laptops than desktops. People are more likely to replace their laptops and the Apple ecosystem forces you to upgrade since they drop support.

I suspect that the fact that it's the last release that runs on 32-bit processors might have something to do with it. There's not much wrong with a 2+ GHz Core Duo for most people's needs.

IMNSHO, Snow Leopard is the last release of OS/X that didn't suck.

Actually it may be Xcode 3 that really made the difference -- all I know is that when I had Snow Leopard on all my machines it was easy to write Mac apps in Lisp.

Now I have to write Objective-C stubs and use the command line to compile Xibs to Nibs which is a royal PITA.

Come to think of it -- I do still have the Snow Leopard DVD (remember those? they used to sell us these shiny round things from which we could reload the products we had bought... oh, nevermind).

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