I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI"

> 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. Thank you for admitting that.

It was definitely a great release. I think that’s a big part of why it’s become legendary. To me the myth is the “no new features”. Apple may have said that in places in marketing but there were new features. Grand Central Dispatch for example. But in the legend that fact is lost.

Yeah as someone else that worked on Snow Leopard I found this article and ones like it a bit silly. They're a lot like the old "debug code" posts on Mac forums back in the day trying to explain why Puma was slow (no, you've got a G3 and an unaccelerated video card). Tiger and Leopard were sprawling releases. Tiger covered 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC, then 32-bit x86, then 64-bit x86 Macs. Tiger was also what I guess I'd say is the first "modern" OSX release, with subsystems like launchd and a more mature OpenDirectory replacing older NeXT subsystems. Leopard in my experience was a train wreck. It shipped a lot of new features, both user facing and back end frameworks, but the development was seriously impacted from teams losing engineers to iOS. Leopard had features planned assuming 100% availability of SWE's resources but ended up with 40-50% of SWE's resources (made up numbers based on m…

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. There was something else going on during that time period though. Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot. Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release. Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to…

I was there too, but this blog post agrees with my memory. I agree with you that Snow Leopard was billed as no USER VISIBLE features. But people did NOT just fix niggling bugs, it was an architecturally huge release. E.g., it introduced GCD. And unless I’m confusing the year, it rewrote the Mail backend to use it and mail hasn’t had reliable search since. My memory is that quality was so low that we pushed back the release. With the extra time we did manage to fix enough bugs that it was well received. But internally it was more destabilizing than most releases due to the amount of architectural churn.

> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.

> If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. What was defined as a feature? The first new thing I noticed in Snow Leopard was that Quick Look could now preview Adobe Illustrator files (it was not the case in Leopard). I very much welcomed that, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of feature addition that would clear a high bar.

I ran Leopard and upgraded to Snow Leopard on a 2006 Core Duo MB Pro as well. My memory is very hazy on details, but I had remember no issues at all with either one. It was a difficult time in my life, as I my employer essentially laid everyone off in late 2009 and I spent the next 18 months unemployed. During that time my Mac was an utterly reliable means of job hunting, studying for certifications, and applying for unemployment.