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  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by Amorymeltzer
  • > bought it off CraigsList for $10, handed off in Times Square

    haha that‘s a nice nostalgic image. I remember installing it on a friend’s laptop with my DVD in a café, to „fix her macbook“.

    by ch_sm
  • 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.

    by vor_
  • It’s annoying to read what amounts to the same reply multiple times in a thread, and needing to commit your username to memory to remember if it was you or not.
    by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
  • The guest account bug was the one thing. But who still uses guest accounts in 2009?
    by frollogaston
  • 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.

    by lisper
  • 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.

    by jtfrench
  • 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.
    by sys_64738
  • 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.
    by giantfrog
  • I got 30 GB back on a 256 GB hard disk drive. It was amazing.
    by delta_p_delta_x
  • fond fond fond memories of Snow Leopard. I was just a kid back then, so I guess I missed the complaints that people are mentioning here, but even back then no shiny new features but an improved and refined product seemed like a good/brave idea. something I'd like to see more of.
    by lurkerforawhile
  • Apple still sells 256gb disks, I'd say every GB still matters.
    by slig
  • 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.
    by kccqzy
  • 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.

    by nickm12
  • 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.
    by jpurnell
  • 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.
    by vor_
  • 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.
    by skhr0680
  • 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.

    by VCFundedGenYer
  • I remember 10.6 being good too, but wasn't 10.6's storage refund only because they dropped PPC support? Makes that part a lot less impressive.
    by frollogaston
  • 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.

    by vor_
  • 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.
    by gord288
  • This is true, but it’s also true of many other OS X and MacOS releases over the years.

    You’ve definitely hit on the core of the issue with the Snow Leopard myth, though: comparing the final battle-hardened bug-patched version of an OS, to a newly released version. Seems like “Snow Leopard” always gets trotted out whenever someone is unhappy with the latest release.

    by snowwrestler
  • 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.
    by kccqzy
  • 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.

    by cosmic_cheese
  • 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.

    by mymacbook
  • 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 deserves its credit and more operating systems should focus on bug fix releases once in a while.

    by pico303
  • > 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.

    by lapcat
  • No one said major software updates are impossible on a yearly schedule. It's obviously possible since Apple's been doing it. What's not possible is major software updates with a normal amount of new features for a major software update at a reasonable level of quality
    by manxiemanx
  • > As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features

    Is this true of operating systems for most people?

    Personally I’d take macOS from 15 years ago (with security bug fixes and new hardware support, assuming modern apps still worked, but no new features) over today’s Windows any day.

    by rlt
  • > 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.

    by alberth