
How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability - rusk
https://9to5mac.com/2018/01/31/snow-leopard-became-reliability-legend/
======
rleigh
Try this out: Take any current MacOS release, any recent one you like. Now,
look at the versions of all the core tools. Stuff like readlink(1). Basic UNIX
tools. Look at the manual page, and note the dates. This is the date of the
tool it was last synced from FreeBSD.

Spoiler: 10.6 is the last release anything significant in the base system was
updated. It's been left to stagnate ever since. For anyone relying on MacOS as
a UNIX system for development, testing or heaven forbid, deployment, this
release marked the end of any serious maintenance work and the divergence of
MacOS X from the mainstream. It's now a decade out of date.

That's not to say no development has taken place. There's a lot gone on at a
higher level. But the base system is so outdated it's now presenting real
compatibility problems. Scripts which work on Linux and the BSDs may no longer
work on MacOS: it's missing a decade of improvements, options, and bugfixes we
all take for granted. The complete lack of care here is beyond ridicule.
Surely a company like Apple could hire one person to take care of this. It's
not like routine maintenance is particularly onerous.

~~~
h1d
Current Apple is sitting on the quality of the past. I wonder when they'll
consume it all.

~~~
Khaine
They are shitting on the quality of the past. They are running on brand
recognition, at least in the Computer space. iPhones are still amazing.

~~~
h1d
They reached to that amazing state around iPhone 5 when competitors were years
behind. Not sure why the world is not on a riot with that weird pack of icons
since iOS 7 but yeah, they're still good, just not much better on each
releases.

------
mattkevan
I've used OS X since the very first betas. Every release has had its bugs, but
every release has been an improvement too.

I don't get the praise/hate online for different releases, or the narrative
that Apple's software quality is turning to crap. It's too shrill to be
genuine.

Are there still annoyances or things that could be better in macOS? Of course.
Is it better than the alternatives or than it used to be? Yes.

I also don't get why you wouldn't want to upgrade to the latest version. At
least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the middle
of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could mention.

Having said that, the initial release of 10.5 Leopard was known as Leper
amongst my friends due to its general tendency to fall over all the time...

~~~
cptskippy
> At least Apple never tried to force-update the machine I was using in the
> middle of an important client pitch, unlike other OS vendors I could
> mention.

You left out the part where you ignored ample warnings that a reboot was
needed for days in advance.

~~~
mattkevan
Wasn’t mine. It was the generic meeting room presentation machine.

Don’t care about what warnings were or weren’t ignored: the main lesson is
that Windows will leave you in the lurch at the worst possible time.

~~~
cptskippy
That sounds like a failure of the IT department then to properly maintain the
machines. Enterprise Windows can be managed very differently than the consumer
versions.

~~~
mattkevan
As prominent tech CEOs have discovered, ‘You’re doing it wrong’ doesn’t go
down all that well as a defence.

------
projectramo
This article doesn't say _how_ it did, but that it did.

However, this is still an interesting piece of history. I didn't realize
anyone considered any particular MacOS better than the others.

I've had several macs since 2012, and I always upgrade. Haven't experienced
any particular issues I can remember.

So this whole thing was missed by me although apparently it was a big event
for other people.

~~~
totoglazer
2012 was already into the decline years. Snow Leopard came out in 2009 and was
replaced with Lion, in 2011.

------
whywhywhywhy
Anyone who has used every version of OSX will tell you it's not a myth.

Although I agree it is mostly remembered because Lion was such an awful
release and objectively a step backwards that took a good few more releases to
finally recover from.

~~~
mitchty
Hi, user of OS X from 10.2 to present. It’s a myth.

Snow leopard was not some mythical stable release without bugs. Hell it had
the remove your home directory bug when logging in as a guest. I’ve personally
had no real problems with the recent releases, I know a fair amount of people
inmy camp too. Angry people are just more vocal.

I know there are a ton of hn posters that will disagree but this whole thing
is like windows 2000 being the most stable release of windows. Or more
recently windows 7.

~~~
jjoonathan
Myth, huh?

    
    
        2001 10.1 Puma:          First OS X to ship by default
        2002 10.2 Jaguar:        GPU compositing, Mail.app / Address Book, MP4
        2003 10.3 Panther:       Safari, iChat AV, Journaled FS, Apple's PDF engine
        2005 10.4 Tiger:         Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, Core Image/Video
        2007 10.5 Leopard:       Core Animation, Time Machine, Boot Camp, 64 bit, intel
        2009 10.6 Snow Leopard:  App Store, XCode overhaul with LLVM, major dev tool updates
        ~~~ wind leaves sails ~~~
        2011 10.7 Lion:          Launchpad, auto-save documents, multi-touch
        2012 10.8 Mountain Lion: Game Center, Notification Center
        2013 10.9 Mavericks:     iBooks, Apple Maps, iCloud integration
        2014 10.10 Yosemite:     Skeuomorphism -> Fisher Price, Continuity & handoff
        2015 10.11 El Capitan:   San Francisco font, Metal API
        2016 10.12 Sierra:       Siri, Auto Unlock, Night Shift
        ~~~ wind returns? ~~~
        2017 10.13 High Sierra:  HEVC, APFS, VR
    

On the upside, High Sierra was a release that lives up to the old standard.
Hopefully that's a trend that will continue.

~~~
mitchty
Can you explain how any of this pertains to a stability problem?

Cherry picking features added to each release is... a weird argument in this
regard.

~~~
jjoonathan
It doesn't. Apple releases were never bugproof. That part of the myth is
counterfactual. The part that isn't counterfactual is that upgrades became
_much_ less attractive after the A team left for the iphone.

------
ken
This is an excellent clickbait headline because the word "myth" in modern
language has two distinct meanings (a popular belief; a falsehood). The
article is about the earlier meaning (e.g., "the legend of Snow Leopard has
steadily grown, its mythology spreading"), while people assume it's about the
latter and get riled up.

(One HN comment here even uses the word in both senses in adjacent sentences!)

It is a myth (well, as much as a computer operating system can be), but that
doesn't mean it's not true.

~~~
rusk
A myth typically refers to a popular belief unsubstantiated by fact.

~~~
swebs
Try reading his post again.

~~~
rusk
What do you mean? He says it's either/or. I'm saying it's both.

~~~
swebs
The main point was that the term can be ambiguous and it's not always both.
The word "myth" is sometimes used synonymously with "creation story" or
sometimes with "lie".

[https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth](https://www.thefreedictionary.com/myth)

~~~
rusk
and with regards to parent comment your point is what exactly?

------
taneq
The only Mac I ever owned was a Snow Leopard laptop. One by one the others in
my team got Lion and Mountain Lion laptops, and I had to sit through their
cursing every day while my battered old silver brick kept soldiering on. I
think these days the battery is pretty well dead and the hard drive is on the
way out but everything else is as solid as the day I bought it, albeit more
covered in iron ore dust from the many mine sites I took it to.

------
gargravarr
Think I've read this article before, but it's relevant with Mojave around the
corner. Snow Leopard remains my favourite OS, period. It was so incredibly
_usable_. Of course, it had bugs - no OS is perfect. But Apple made a wise
decision. Leopard was a runaway success - the gorgeous UI with metal accents
and its deep purple default background, well-established workflows and other
aspects - and Apple just refined it, making it pure x86-64 (it performed much
better on my MBP than Leopard with its lingering PPC support) and embracing
open technologies (OpenGL and OpenCL especially) to increase performance, but
__leaving the UI alone __.

Every release since has been trying to 'modernise' the UI, with extremely
varied success. I recently got a Retina MBP and installed Sierra on it, and I
use none of the new UI features. In fact, there are times I miss simple things
like the 'lozenge' to switch a Disk Image window into a full Finder window. I
hate the washed out, low-contrast, flattened look of the current OS. It
staggers me that, in an era where we have a glut of processing performance on
tap, the UI has less 3D elements than 10 years ago when you needed dedicated
GPUs. There's no eye candy or anything that would make you step back and
appreciate the thought and design that went into the interface; it all just
blends together. Sure, it's not distracting, but I like clearly defined
buttons that tell me where I can click. I like the UI to do exactly what it's
told and not try to get me to change my ways (Siri, Launchpad etc.). And what
the HELL is this __obsession __with Dark Mode?! I have seen zero useful
reasons to upgrade to High Sierra or Mojave. The feature lists are wearing
thin. Apple have long since run out of ideas for the OS on its own, but it
seems they 've also run out of ideas to copy from iOS, so their current
approach is to make some superficial UI tweaks and call it a new OS. Maybe
making the OS chargeable again would help - I actually bought Snow Leopard
(still have the DVD at home, used it this year to build a VM!) and it's one of
the most satisfying pieces of software I've handed over money for. Maybe the
total loss of revenue from the OS division has sucked the motivation right out
of them.

------
Wildgoose
I loved Snow Leopard. It's been downhill ever since, and I did hear that Apple
has been moving their MacOS development teams to work on iOS instead. I'm
afraid it shows - I've just bought a new Windows machine, my first this
century.

~~~
fhood
As a user of the latest versions of both macOS and Windows, I'll still take
macOS any day. At the moment it is their hardware I am frustrated with, not
their software.

~~~
h1d
After using macOS as main OS around Tiger, using Windows today is nothing but
a source of frustration including third party apps with million options and
menu items.

------
kradeelav
Can confirm, my 2010 Snow Leopard is still my main workhorse despite being
used every day with demanding design programs, and replacing the battery / RAM
once (and being dropped several times, imagine that).

At this point I'm honestly not sure what I'll replace it with - hoping to
extend its lifespan for at least another 5 years which is ironically looking
possible.

------
mbesto
Is there any other release that gave users back as much hard disk space as SL?

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-
os-x-10-6/3/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/3/)

------
peatmoss
The first version of OS X I ran was the beta that didn’t look much like the UI
we know today. In those days I was a NetBSD user. The first public release of
OS X was mana from heaven for me.

I think the addition of Expose (Panther?) was the high point for me in terms
of OS X releases. The addition of Spotlight shortly thereafter marked the
beginning of features that I started disabling either partially or wholly.

Now I’m not entirely comfortable running macOS as a daily driver simply
because I know heaps of crap is turned on that I probably don’t want, and
don't have the time or inclination to research the likely security
implications.

We crossed a point a few years ago where I rediscovered free *nixen, and
decided that it was easier to make Xubuntu do what I want than it was to make
macOS not do what I didn’t want. I miss simple OS X.

------
tehabe
There is only one issue I'm having with macOS or Mac OS X today, they still
use 10.x and they had three wonderful possibilities to switch to 11:

Lion: Darwin 11. (Also leaving behind PowerPC) El Capitan: Simply remove the
10. High Sierra: Sync with iOS 11.

But Apple didn't do it.

On a serious note:

The other thing I really disliked was FileVault 1, which based on a sparse
image file and was an horror to backup. And in Panther it was at first
extremely unreliable. I think I lost some data back then. FV2 based on
CoreStorage was much, much better. Which came with Lion btw.

------
cjensen
For me Snow Leopard was significantly more buggy than Leopard.

The lesson here, if there is one: in sufficiently complicated software, every
release is worse for someone.

------
kimdotcom
10.6.8!!!

------
Torai
With marketing, cultism and people who has to somehow auto convince themselves
and others about the reasons they have to pay more for the same thing PC
owners have?

Are companies/people using Windows or Linux feeling less reliability? And more
importantly, do they get to do work faster or not?

------
wintorez
Somewhat unrelated to the article, but one thing I learned about all Apple
products is this: Never upgrade their OS. Doing minor updates is fine, but any
major version upgrade will doom the device.

~~~
sdhgaiojfsa
My iPhone has been through three major OS releases. My MacBook has been
through two, and the previous one survived three. However you came to your
current beliefs, I don't think there is good data to support them. Apple is
quite good about OS upgrades in general.

~~~
rusk
I don't think my iPhone was ever damaged by an update - I always migrated to a
newer one before the newer OSes caused strain. I was one of those who held off
on the initial releases of iOS 7 ..

But my god Yosemite in 2015 (again waited for it to "stabilise") on my 2014
MBP was an unholy shitshow.

