I ran it for a while on my late 2011 MBP, unfortunately, I got too used to the features of Lion and later, that even with programs to update the workflow didn’t cut it.

My favorite release of the Aqua UI, I miss the colorful sidebars, the custom skeomorphic UI on some programs which gave it a distinctive aura, like custom tailored to each function but still belonging in the system. Font rendering was also absurdly good on a crappy 13’ HD display and since Yosemite it got a bit worse.

Stability wise it was definitely a rock solid release, at least, in the later stages of its main support where most bugs were ironed out. Few have come close to the built like a tank feeling, Mavericks was the Snow Leopard to the Lion and Mountain Lion releases.

And the damn intro video made you feel like home, since then they’ve all felt like going to the doctors office, no matter how relatable they try to make it pretty colors, it still feels dull and boring.

They should pull a Snow Leopard style release, keep a single version for a few years whilst they iron out the bugs and slowly work on a new version instead of releasing every year what are essentially very similar systems that kill support for the oldest supported models of a year in the previous version. Snow Leopard had a few more years of 3rd party support even after Apple was done with it and the community loved it.

This is an excellent article. I will highlight two sections I thought were most relevant:

When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a “Snow Leopard update”, they’re wishing for the wrong thing. No major update will solve Apple’s quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues.

We need to go back to biennial (once every 2 years) releases, to give the engineering team time to reduce their technical debt and stabilize major releases.

If each new major update introduces new bugs, and some of those bugs remain unfixed before the next major update is released, then over the course of multiple major updates you have bugs continuing to pile on top of each other, forming an ugly garbage heap.

That is the tech debt I mentioned above. Even iOS doesn’t need to have yearly releases because smartphones are mature products now.

Personally, I have not upgraded from 16.7.2 on my 14 PM because it is quite stable, battery life is excellent, and there is nothing I want from iOS 17’s features. I will likely only upgrade when iOS 18 comes out with (apparently) major changes to AI-related features.

On the Mac side, since it’s a mission critical device I only update when the latest Xcode stops supporting the version I’m running (Ventura 13.6.2).

This makes me feel ancient, I remember installing it on my Mac with the DVD and feeling gutted they removed the intro movie

It seems that Sierra Wireless 3G modems are the last WWAN drivers built into OSX.

Later releases did not add drivers for LTE modems, and all WWAN support has moved to Instant Hotspot with iPhone.

Snow Leopard was a huge update for my MacBook, fixed a load of issues, and was screaming fast. This isn’t my faulty memory. That’s how I experienced it at the time. Just because Snow Leopard didn’t fix every single bug ever, and needed bug fixes itself, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bugfix release because it fixed a lot. And those bugfixes that came after Snow Leopard’s release weren’t necessarily fixes for bugs that were introduced with Snow Leopard, they were just fixed in a Snow Leopard update.

I miss Aqua UI. That lickable button.

Wow, that was a very long “ackshully.”

Snow Leopard was great from day 1 for me. I remember I had just bought the first 13” MacBook Pro and slapped in an SSD drive and used some keyboard combination to force the OS to boot into 64 bit kernel mode. That thing was a screamer.

OSX was pretty buggy at the beginning. Once Snow Leopard arrived things improved significantly. Stability was probably the most significant change. I ran one computer over a year without rebooting. Another went almost a year without rebooting. Now I’m lucky to get two weeks. It was also a time when Apple was still deeply committed to a UI that was efficient and orderly. Now, thanks to Ives, we have a mess and Apple keeps doubling down on it. So I do miss the Snow Leopard days but I think things will get far worse before they get better. Once we are all running IOS Apple will have the locked down interface they seem to want.

Back when the order backlog for an iMac27 at the local dealer was so long and problematic that I almost skipped over Leopard. Also, I ran the thing on 4GB of RAM until I got another 8GB in the Mavericks days.

The issue with having so many yearly releases is also just the explosion of OS versions you have to think about. I release an open source app and it’s always kind of a pain that I have to think about all these different OS versions, each with its own quirks and minor bugs (some of which aren’t directly visible to the end user), and it makes testing annoying.

Apple would probably just say “just update to the latest OS”, but you can’t just get all users to do that because each new macOS version stops support for some not-too-old hardware (7 years is not that old for a computer) and sometimes people don’t want to upgrade to a new OS for random reasons (stability, or some software stops working in a new OS version, or they just prefer the older UI). I do agree that at at least switching to a 2-year cycle would probably help a bit. Right now there’s just too much churn, and not enough concrete improvement in each macOS release to justify the churn.

Snow Leopard is the best OS update Apple has released in the past 25 years. I ran it for as long as possible, and every OS release since then has been a disappointment of bugs, feature removal, and stupidity.