The myth of Snow Leopard

Oh, 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 for us to look at and determine if it should go in an update. I packaged and audited the builds and tuned the delta vs full updates. I built the system that largely automated diffing "trains" for software updates (automastering).

The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. 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. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different.

Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. I am not sure why people on the internet don't believe that, but I was there. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. In normal feature releases it operated bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".

AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs.

The first .1 or .2 ALWAYS fixed critical bugs, because:

1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in software updates...which was developed concurrently with the end of the main release (hence why .1 came out right away)

2. Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn't even the complete OS that was being tested.

Software updates are always needed, though the issues they fix became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices. But I can tell you FOR A FACT that Snow Leopard had fewer major bugs over its lifetime, coalesced very quickly, and was extremely solid when Lion was released.

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 dogfood while we made our own mistakes on iOS.

As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. 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.

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.

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.

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.

I 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.

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.

Snow Leopard _did_ focus on stability. It wasn't just marketing. Did new bugs (and even new features) slip in? Yes, of course. It's still an OS made by humans, making imperfect cost-benefit calculations on how to mitigate risk while providing increased value to the end user.

So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.

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.

Here is what I wrote about it at the time:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/08/snow-leopard-is-disaster...

Consistent with this article's take on the situation 17 years later.

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.

YMMV. I ran Snow Leopard on a couple of machines for years—bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square—and it was far and away the best OSX experience I had, and, at least in my experience, the best/smoothest/most stable until El Capitan, 10.11. And yes, maybe I'm thinking of 10.6.8, but I don't see why that's a problem.

The myth part, is of course, a myth, and good marketing. Snow Leopard was super important for the OS, changing a ton: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c...>. Marketing gonna market.

Regardless, I can agree with this:

>People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.

Why write working software once, when you can make an entire career out of constantly refactoring a new broken mess?

Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it. Microsoft ignored everyone and said, “You fool users just don’t understand what makes a good operating system.” Snow Leopard was the next major OS release and it just worked the way people expected an OS to work. Paired with solid understated marketing, it felt like users were respected for their choices in an OS once again. MS was forced to follow suit with W7.

Now, MS is back to ignoring users by forcing telemetry and AI. Too bad we don’t still have Steve Jobs to show them how it’s done.

A lot of comments are missing (IMO) the main point, which is the conclusion in the last paragraph.

> Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification.

A lot of people want stability and polish. They get enshittification. I regard mobile app updates as new versions are usually worse TomTom (the free version - that replaced Amigo) is a good example. A major update took away the feature that most made me use it in the first place - it had full screen turn indicators you could see without looking at it directly (so not looking away from the road).

On the other hand its hard to think of a mobile app or website update that actually added anything I want recently. Things like Facebook certainly keep getting worse (especially for a group admin which is why I usually go on there). Banking websites mostly want to seem to push you to use the app.

I Think Apple's latest OS versions are completely beyond snow leopard. Apple has destroyed their product with extreme security and sandboxing. It has become completely pay to play. I simply stopped upgrading since thing only get worse. As for other companies' 'snow leopard', that is their business. What I remember about snow leopard is that I could do with my Mac what I wanted, now I have to circumvent one security after another and eventually use Google to get a format that I need. Use Google, can you imagine? It's a complete disappointment

I still have a MacBook from that era and to this day - it boots up and runs apps fine without issues (though a bit slower than I'm used to). It's been my little time capsule of how my life was in middle school / high school.

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.

Snow Leopard wasn't significantly any better or worse than other Mac OS versions of the time. It was just around for longer, after Leopard which was also around for longer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_of_Mac_opera...

More dot releases fixed stuff and people grew used to its quirks (which there were many).

Note that the lull also lined up with the intense focus and high development pace Apple had on iOS in the early years. Ironically making the commentariat of the time ask if Apple had given up on the Mac.

I like how macOS is today, but Snow Leopard was the best version for its time. Also the biggest upgrade was Leopard to SL, biggest downgrade was SL to Lion. So idk what the author's complaint is.

"As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard"

Those early MacBooks had 32-bit CPUs. Wonder if Snow Leopard was problematic on those, since that's when Apple started the transition to 64-bit, finalizing in Lion. Would still be bad if this were the reason, but might also explain why other people had a better experience.

Whoever was in charge of Mac OS X at that time should be promoted to the President of Operating Systems of this entire planet.

Any change is a breaking change. The release cleaned things up, this inevitably led to deprecated parts being dropped and unwanted/undefined/outdated behavior being changed.

Just because it's marked as "no feature" it doesn't mean it was a "no user changes" release.

This article is revisionist and lost -- it decidedly disagrees with my direct memory. I had Snow Leopard on a vm for years -- not because I was misguided, but because it was a very stable release in many dimensions and deserved its status.

Performance wise 10.6 had a significant impact positive on my old MBP4,1 (the last non-unibody MacBook) and back then I was sure it mainly was because of GCD and Core Animation.

Sorry 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.

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.

I'm sorry, but this is horseshit. Snow Leopard is beloved by the Mac user base for a reason. It was legitimately faster and more stable than any prior release.

i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?

This was my memory as well. Lion was the first version of OS X that was usable as a daily driver.

Bring back grid Expose and grid virtual desktops!

Bullshit