> I ran pretty much all the updates (switched between majors and security updates and others with my team) as well as helped with the custom OSes for hardware released between.
Could you clarify what you mean by "ran"? Originally I thought you meant that you were the manager in charge of the 10.6.1 and 10.5.8 releases: "the person who personally ran" is singular. Whereas now I'm getting the impression that you were just one of many engineers who installed and used internal builds of the updates?
> People don't say Snow Leopard was great because it had no bugs, they say it was great because it had fewer bugs they experienced at release and converged quickly to something that was very stable, much more quickly than previous releases
That's precisely where we disagree. My impression is that people are just looking back fondly at the later versions of Snow Leopard.
> (Apple didn't have telemetry at the time and had to rely on forums and apple care reports). The majority of people had no issues with SL, which was not the case with Leopard.
These two sentences seem a bit contradictory. ;-)
> Leopard's development internally was also more chaotic FWIW.
Externally too. Leopard was infamously delayed for iPhone.
> Trust me, SL was of higher quality than Leopard.
Well, from my perspective, "Leopard" and "Snow Leopard" are a bit amorphous. They are brand names, not specific pieces of software. 10.6.0 was definitely not higher quality than 10.5.8, as I think you've admitted already. And that's precisely why I object whenever people say, "We need another Snow Leopard". It's never the major releases that create quality, stable software but rather the long train of minor bug fix updates that occur afterward.
By the way, I also remember an NSURLConnection crasher that was introduced in 10.6.3 and IIRC plagued us for a number of 10.6.x versions until it was finally fixed. https://openradar.appspot.com/7841731
I certainly admit that Snow Leopard was less ambitious than Leopard, and thus 10.6.0 likely introduced fewer new bugs than 10.5.0. If you have to ship a major update, then obviously fewer new features is going to create less disruption than more new features. But the fundamental quality problem today is that Apple forces itself to ship new major updates every year. That's completely unnecessary, a self-inflicted wound. If you look back prior to the annual schedule, the major Mac OS X releases came 14, 18, 30, 22, and 23 months apart. That's much more reasonable.
> Nowadays, shipping is less of a major event due to CI, automated tests, betas, no CDs/DVDs, recovery partitions, etc. We're in a much better world!
You cannot be serious! As far as I see, Apple software quality is worse now than ever.
And just to compound the problems, we never get a "stable" version anymore, because Apple continues to ship new features throughout the year, even in "minor" updates, so even 11 months after the .0 release, we still get the bugginess, and after every .0 release Apple has to turn around relatively quickly and start work on the next major version in order to be ready for the next WWDC in June. It's a vicious cycle.
If anything, CD/DVD installers were good, because only the most eager users ran to the retail stores to buy them and jump onto the bleeding edge new versions, and bugs could be fixed before the majority of users eventually installed the major updates, whereas now Apple is pushes users hard to install major updates over the air immediately at .0.