Nick Heer: linking to Jeff Johnson's The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I read an article today from yet another person pining for a mythical Snow Leopard-style MacOS release. While I sympathize with the intent of their argument, it is largely fictional and, as Johnson writes, it took until about two years into Snow Leopard’s release cycle for it to be the release we want to remember

I read the same referenced article and had a similar thought: has the myth of Snow Leopard obscured the reality of what it was like at the time? This general idea of idealizing the past seems to come up more and more as I get older. Nostalgia's a hell of a drug.

But I took this as a chance to read through some reviews of Snow Leopard at the time to see what the vibe was, and the gist seems to be people thought this was a good release on day one, but definitely had problems (huh, sounds quite a bit like modern macOS updates). This also gave me an excuse to read most of John Siracusa's review and god damn, I'd forgotten how good his writing was in these reviews. It's fantastic, but I wanted to quote this bit from near the end when he was summing up his overall thoughts about the update:

Though it's obvious that Snow Leopard includes fewer external features than its predecessor, I'd wager that it has just as many, if not more internal changes than Leopard. This, I fear, means that the initial release of Snow Leopard will likely suffer the typical 10.x.0 bugs. There have already been reports of new bugs introduced to existing APIs in Snow Leopard. This is the exact opposite of Snow Leopard's implied promise to users and developers that it would concentrate on making existing features faster and more robust without introducing new functionality and the accompanying new bugs.

As called out in most of the reviews, the Snow Leopard announcement was a one-hour presentation showing tons of new things in the operating system, although that famous "zero new features" slide is all that people remember. There were tons of new APIs, tons of changes to existing APIs, dropping 32-bit machines completely, had a totally rewritten Finder, a totally rewritten QuickTime (a more commonly used app back then), and more. Yes, it was less user-facing features than was typical, but it was far from a "bug fixes only" release like it's been built up as in people's minds over the years.

Snow Leopard would receive 8 updates over the next 2 years before its successor (Lion) was released, and I think that Snow Leopard 10.6.8 is what most people have in their minds as what Snow Leopard was from the start. Imagine if Apple released an update and spent 2 years refining it over and over, instead of what feels like getting it out in the fall and then immediately shifting focus to the next year's update. On the other hand, do you want the Mac to lag behind iOS in terms of features? More and more, Apple is shipping the same feature set across all of their platforms, and I just don't see a reality in the near future where that schedule ends. If anything, Apple's moving towards a more iterative model where they release meaningful feature updates several times a year instead of all at once like they used to.

For what it's worth, I too would like some things in macOS to be refined (my last post was literally about a macOS complaint I want them to fix), I just don't think we're in the sort of era where Apple slows down their feature updates on the Mac. Also, as a user of several Apple platforms, I don't particularly like it when the Mac is left behind on things like iMessage updates for a year compared to the iPhone and iPad (which used to happen more frequently 5-10 years ago). Snow Leopard was really fantastic once it was patched up. I get the appeal of doing it again in 2025, but I also think we've built Snow Leopard up so much over the years that we forget it wasn't the perfect release we remember it as.