Snow Leopard Was a Myth, and We All Fell for It
The Myth of Snow Leopard
Apple marketed Mac OS X Snow Leopard as a stability-focused release with '0 new features,' a promise that has since become a rallying cry for users of every platform. But as Rubenerd recounts, the reality was far messier: his own attempts to run it ended in downgrades, and Jeff Johnson's post lists the bugs it introduced. Yet the myth endures because people crave quality-of-life improvements over endless feature churn.
This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS.
- LegNeato
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 plannin […]
- mymacbook
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.
- gord288
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.
- 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.
- jpurnell
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.
- nickm12
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.
- jtfrench
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.
- nkotov
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.