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Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

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Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#21

Post by AHTERIX5000 »

rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

Spotlight straight up broke on both of my Macs after Sequoia. It can't even find exact matches in many directories marked for indexing and re-indexing did nothing. Just searching for apps under Applications doesn't seem to find all apps.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#22

Post by rcarmo »

geerlingguy wrote: post #6

> In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in. Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most stable and useful OS versions: OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a few smaller quality of…

Settings is not that bad. It's _awful_, yes, since it broke the panel design we had since the NeXT days, but for me the real annoyance is the way Apple progressively, inexorably broke desktop automation to a point where they now effectively painted themselves into a corner regarding having enough of a foundation to make Apple Intelligence useful (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/03/14/1830).

That said, I expect things to get worse as they manage to converge their multiple platforms in exactly the wrong way (by dumbing them down across the board even as people keep hoping they'll make iPad OS more useful, etc.).

But at least we still have Safari, Apple Silicon is pretty amazing and I can survive inside Terminal and vim. For now.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#23

Post by lapcat »

See my blog post "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html

TL;DR What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0, which was in fact very buggy, and buggier than 10.5.8, but rather later versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of bug fixes.

See also "Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data": https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...

The yearly release cycle is the problem. Apple needs "another Snow Leopard" only in the sense that I mentioned above, "almost 2 full years of bug fixes", although at this point, Apple has more than 2 years of technical debt.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#25

Post by dcow »

bigdubs wrote: post #7
asadotzler wrote: post #2

I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good." There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the process in a meaningful way after letting i…

Adding to this, a solution might be enabling continuous releases and leaning into release channels could help in terms of getting more out to users. In practice it's a challenge because the OS bundles a lot of separate things into releases, namely Safari changes are tied to OS changes which are tied to Apple Pay features which are tied to so on and so on. It would require a lot of feature flagging and extra complexit…

I think they’re painted into a corner with WWDC. Everything has to be a crowd pleasing brain busting wow drop each year. I’m certain there are teams that design their entire workflow around the yearly wwdc. It honestly feels like an executive leadership problem to solve.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#26

Post by rcarmo »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #13
geerlingguy wrote: post #6

> In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in. Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most stable and useful OS versions: OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a few smaller quality of…

Minor nitpick about early OS X There was no acceleration (even 2D!) until 10.2

Well, actually, there was. I was doing OpenGL stuff at the time on a Bondi iMac that barely ran early OS X and distinctly remember that.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#27

Post by zombiwoof »

rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

Spotlight seemed to go from great to unusable in 5 years

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#28

Post by basisword »

I feel like they're trying to build too many platforms most of which have become quite large. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, visionOS, watchOS, tvOS. The fact all of these systems are quite tightly linked in terms of features/syncing makes it difficult to navigate. If you want to ship every single year you need more developers, but that might make the collaboration between the systems more difficult. They need to move away from the one year cycle. It's a stupidly short period of time to ship a whole OS (or 6 whole OS's). If you want to keep them all in sync switch to two year cycles and decouple some of the apps from the core OS (e.g. Music, Safari, etc) so they can be updated as necessary outside of the cycle.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#29

Post by rcarmo »

dmitrygr wrote: post #14
rcarmo wrote: post #10

There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased. It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and…

> prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage). Settings -> Spotlight -> Websites, UNCHECK

Does not work. I happen to know a fair bit about mdutil and the like and confirmed that does exactly nothing for my particular issue. A full Spotlight index reset works temporarily, but after a while it just conks out again.

Also, I vaguely remember there being a way to _order_ results, not just disable them.

Re: Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

#30

Post by basisword »

themagician wrote: post #18

This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it. I bought an M1 Max tha…

I don't feel like they ever used forced obsolescence with Mac's. When they dropped support for the latest OS on your machine it was usually because it couldn't run it. I recently updated some older Mac's and even a couple of OS's before support was dropped things got really sluggish. I imagine with the Apple Silicon machines the OS support will stretch longer than it has on the Intel ones. Maybe the higher prices are a hint they expect people to keep the machines in use for longer than before.
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