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The myth of Snow Leopard

rubenerd.au

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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#21

Post by alberth »

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…

> As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#22

Post by skhr0680 »

jpurnell wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#23

Post by thomassmith65 »

lapcat wrote: post #11
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 ag…

I just reread the blogpost (by the parent) that this article cites, and its points all seem correct to me, including that "Mac OS X 10.6.0 was certainly much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8":

• 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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#24

Post by VCFundedGenYer »

I don't agree, as someone who lived that era. Snow Leopard was the best OS X release in terms of performance, made immediately apparent by the disastrous release of 10.7 Lion and several years beyond.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#25

Post by vor_ »

jpurnell wrote: post #14

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.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#26

Post by vor_ »

pico303 wrote: post #3
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…

There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism. 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 d…

I'd say Snow Leopard was as buggy as any other typical OS X release from that era, as covered by the Jeff Johnson article. The reality is that the "no new features" marketing was most likely a positive spin on the shift in engineering resources toward iOS, which had previously caused Leopard's release to be delayed.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#28

Post by vor_ »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #24

I don't agree, as someone who lived that era. Snow Leopard was the best OS X release in terms of performance, made immediately apparent by the disastrous release of 10.7 Lion and several years beyond. 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.

I lived that era too, and Snow Leopard was no less buggy than any other release. What actually happened is that engineers had been shifted over to iOS, which delayed Leopard. By the time of Snow Leopard, to put a positive spin on that lack of resources, Snow Leopard was a "no new features" release...even though it actually did receive new features as well as new bugs.

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#29

Post by fastball »

I remember going from Tiger to Leopard and thinking "this is nice, I like a lot of these changes" and then going from Leopard to Snow Leopard and thinking "wow this is great". Then Lion came along and I was like "this is meh".

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.

Re: The myth of Snow Leopard

#30

Post by vor_ »

Snow Leopard was so buggy that it had an infamous data loss bug: https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d...

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.

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