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The myth of Snow Leopard

rubenerd.au

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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#11

Post by lapcat »

mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#14

Post by jpurnell »

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#15

Post by mrkpdl »

Another underlying reason snow leopard is so fondly remembered is it was the final purely Mac version of Mac OS X. Starting with lion the focus shifted to bringing iOS-like features and design to Mac OS X. And it has never been Mac first since.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#16

Post by cosmic_cheese »

gord288 wrote: post #8

As I recall, there were plenty of legitimate user gripes when the very first iteration of Snow Leopard (10.6.0) was released. But by the time of the very last point-release (10.6.11?), the OS was rock-solid. It was only after all the initial bugs were ironed out, that Snow Leopard achieved the legendary status that it has enjoyed ever since. The blogger doesn’t take this factor into account.

Mavericks played out similarly as far as I can recall. Earlier releases had issues but by the last minor update it was quite solid.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#17

Post by sys_64738 »

The final SL point release was very stable. Still is. Lion was a horrible and nasty release which shouldn't have seen the light of day. FWIW, SL introduced several new UI elements into OS X as they needed something to show off at release. Something. Anything.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#18

Post by musicale »

mymacbook wrote: post #2

I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogf…

> 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

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#19

Post by kccqzy »

gord288 wrote: post #8

As I recall, there were plenty of legitimate user gripes when the very first iteration of Snow Leopard (10.6.0) was released. But by the time of the very last point-release (10.6.11?), the OS was rock-solid. It was only after all the initial bugs were ironed out, that Snow Leopard achieved the legendary status that it has enjoyed ever since. The blogger doesn’t take this factor into account.

It was 10.6.8 v1.1. They didn’t want to increment the version number so they made a version number on top of a version number.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#20

Post by kccqzy »

giantfrog wrote: post #12

I have great memories of Snow Leopard. It even gave you back a few GB of storage (IIRC) at a time when every GB really counted.

Yes. I was poking around all the different ways Apple was shaving storage and I found that the Leopard welcome animation (showing the word welcome in different languages in a galaxy) was stored in JPEGs, one for each frame; the Snow Leopard one was finally a video in H.264.
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