i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?
Yeah, there's a sentence about how they downgraded twice!
The myth of Snow Leopard
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Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#52Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…
Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card).
Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'd say is the first "modern" OSX release, with subsystems like launchd and a more mature OpenDirectory replacing older NeXT subsystems.
Leopard in my experience was a train wreck. It shipped a lot of new features, both user facing and back end frameworks, but the development was seriously impacted from teams losing engineers to iOS. Leopard had features planned assuming 100% availability of SWE's resources but ended up with 40-50% of SWE's resources (made up numbers based on my feels at the time). Many new frameworks in Leopard did not land or get stable until very late in the development cycle which meant everything downstream had to scramble right before GM. It was 100% the case that Leopard was not really stable until 10.5.8 and still sucked IMHO.
There was a lot of clean-up needed in MacOS and that was Snow Leopard. It was not a perfect release but 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable. Dropping PowerPC support really helped focus QA since they didn't need the massive array of test hardware Tiger and Leopard required. You also didn't need to wrangle builds for four architectures, including multiple compilers as a few libraries (if not whole frameworks) were compiled with ICC on x86 for performance reasons.
The "Snow Leopard wasn't that great" meme is weird. I'm sure it had its problems like every OSX release did. Unfortunately most OSX releases broke someone's workflow[0]. Snow Leopard ware no different. But it was always billed internally as a "no new features" release and those features that it did ship faced a very high bar to get in the release. I definitely look back on Snow Leopard as a high water mark for macOS quality in terms of a release.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
FreeBSD is definitely not a "GPL OS", the license is right in the name!
To be pedantic “BSD” is the name of the original distribution that FreeBSD is based on, and the license is also named after it (rather than FreeBSD being named after the license).
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#54I 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…
> don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable. Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things". I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I do…
I agree- I also dont think OS features of the kind that get shipped in these updates are convincing anyone to switch from pc to mac or upgrade their mac sooner. Tons of stuff just changing for the sake of change. Meanwhile LLMs increasingly only need the command line to do everything.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#55Sorry dude, but you're a liar.
Not long ago, a friend of my dad was showing me his old Macbook Pro (one of those big 17-inch aluminum ones). He never upgraded the OS and somehow Safari can still open his email and he has Word and stuff.
That thing was running soooooo smoooth, zero lag, no flickering, no quirks, apps open immediately, etc. That release was peak OS X. I have an M5 Max and it doesn't feel that good.
Tahoe is a massive joke, I downgraded my three laptops to Sequoia and plan to stay there indefinitely.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#56I remember Snow Leopard as a particularly stable release, but it's been so long this could easily be misremembering. One other thing that was notable about Snow Leopard, though, was that it was the last release before the iOSification of the Mac. Starting with Lion, Apple increasingly tried to unify the platforms and bring ideas and designs from iOS to the Mac, with mixed success.
For myself Snow Leopard holds a special place as the last "pure Mac" release and a culmination of a decade of Mac OS X releases. I skipped over Lion and Mountain Lion, finally getting back on the upgrade train with Mavricks, so I ran Snow Leopard for about four years.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#57Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…
> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.
There was something else going on during that time period though.
Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.
Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.
Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#58Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…
I was there too, but this blog post agrees with my memory.
I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since.
My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#59Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…
> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing.
That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.
Re: The myth of Snow Leopard
#60Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up... I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally…
> So, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. Thank you for admitting that. > Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind Also the last, apparently.
How about Mountain Lion vs Lion?