Snow Leopard at 15
Today marks the 15th anniversary of Apple releasing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which became available to purchase for $29 on August 28, 2009.
After advertising Mac OS X Leopard as having “over 300 new features” in 2007, Apple previewed Snow Leopard at WWDC 2008. Notably, during that year’s “State of the Union” session, Apple showed a presentation slide that said the update had “0 new features,” as Apple opted to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements.
Perhaps the more important anniversary is that of macOS 10.6.8 v1.1 on July 25, 2011. Yes, Snow Leopard didn’t really have any new user-facing features, but it had big changes the hood and was kind of a rough release at the outset. The Snow Leopard we remember fondly is the final version, released after almost two years of refinements.
Or, put another way, there were “no new features” between the initial releases of Leopard on October 26, 2007 and Lion on July 20, 2011.
Mac OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard appreciation post.
I never liked the capsule-style toolbar buttons in Mail, and iTunes didn’t yet use a standard table view, but otherwise I think the visuals in Snow Leopard have aged pretty well. We’ve gone from colored sidebar icons on a monochrome background to monochrome symbols on a busy, colored background.
Previously:
- The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
- A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
- Quality Management in Apple’s System Updates Over Time
- The Case for Postponing macOS 10.16
- The Pace of macOS Updates
- How Apple Plans to Root Out Bugs
- Apple’s Software Quality Decline
Update (2024-09-06): Adam Maxwell:
I still have my brown zippered hoodie from Customer Seeding for Snow Leopard testing. I miss the look and feel with color (except for the capsule toolbar controls), proper scrollbars, and ability to tell if a window is active.
Not to be too much of a party-pooper about Snow Leopard and it’s No New Features promise of a focus on reliability but—it came as iPhone OS 2.0 had just shipped, iPad was a year out, made major changes to the Finder, got all(?) system apps to be 64bit, and introduced GCD (Dispatch). So, you know, it was probably as heavy a lift, if not more so, than other macOS releases.
Culturally, Snow Leopard is held in high regard as it represented a dramatic shift in priorities from features to foundation. It showed that Apple was willing to restrain itself from more consumer-facing flashy new features and instead strengthen its most crucial software.
To celebrate the 15-year anniversary of Snow Leopard, I’ve taken five of its most iconic wallpapers and upscaled them to fit beautifully on a 6K display.
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I don't understand the "to put it another way" section. Maybe I'm too tired.
I understand it as a very valid criticism of the shit show of yearly releases of half-assed new OS versions. But maybe that's just because I want to understand it that way :).
There was at least one new feature added to Snow Leopard: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/01/06Apples-Mac-App-Store-Opens-for-Business/
10.6.8 is also when weak-import classes shipped on Mac OS X, which means that in theory you could write software that keeps supporting it while still being able to adopt later OS features in many ways (I don't remember how feasible it was to keep running Snow Leopard as your main OS, in practice).
We all long for Apple to ditch the pointless yearly release cycle and actually produce a good version of macOS again.
I think the big, often-unremarked change post-Snow Leopard is that it was the last major release distributed on optical media. Once the move to large, downloadable OS releases began there came (and continues to be) a slew of added features which are better than beta but in need of more attention that users are left to hope come in a point release but often don't arrive for a year until the next major release. Along with long periods of half-baked features, good luck to the users whose Macs are not supported by the next major release.
I don't think it was 10.6.8 as such that made for the fond memories of Snow Leopard, no, though I acknowledge that it was very stable. I think it was the whole sodding ethos of Mac OS X since 10.6. In fact, I distinctly remember being pissed when 10.6.2 came out, breaking format=flowed in Mail and replacing it with QP-encoding for everything (bug-for-bug compatibility with Outlook?). Nowadays that just seems like such a quaint complaint, given the only other full-time exposure I'd had pre-SL was Leopard, which introduction of Time Machine seemed to me to be very cool.Let's be honest here, the real problem nowadays is the stupid pace of releases and the iOSification of everything, which just takes the delight out of the platform. It certainly isn't true that there weren't features since SL that were worth having, either (trust me, I tried it, just to test this hypothesis for myself): Resume (of windows following restart), British spelling dictionaries, Notification Centre (yes, yes, valid objections, but still an important addition), many bugs fixed and additions made to VoiceOver (with new bugs added, naturally), etc, etc. It's just that Apple no longer cares about the quality of the finished product or the direction of the platform going forward, except as a tag-along for iOS.
Oh, and there was one new major user-facing feature in SL: Exchange Support. :)
>otherwise I think the visuals in Snow Leopard have aged pretty well.
I thought the Leopard/Snow Leopard visuals were gaudy. Especially the Dock. (I get that they were in part trying to show off how powerful Core Animation was.)
>Oh, and there was one new major user-facing feature in SL: Exchange Support. :)
Indeed. Decent-sized deal for corporate users.
>Culturally, Snow Leopard is held in high regard as it represented a dramatic shift in priorities from features to foundation. It showed that Apple was willing to restrain itself from more consumer-facing flashy new features and instead strengthen its most crucial software.
I'm more with Michael on this one. It wasn't so much an intentional shift in priorities as it was necessary: foundational improvements like GCD were needed, and higher-level changes that came in Lion weren't yet ready.
Of course, they arguably weren't ready when Lion shipped either. The "stable" Lion was Mountain Lion.
Every now and then I open up a late 2009 MacBook to run a particular legacy application under Snow Leopard, and each time I am struck by how snappy and delightful the experience is. I never feel like I am fighting against what Apple wants me to do. It feels like it is *my* computer, not Apple's.
I have a particular love for Snow Leopard because Lion was such a bad follow up. Uglier and slower, I hated it on the same hardware. There were some under the hood improvements to stuff like Time Machine, but honestly, it was a terrible release. The Icing on the Dumpster Fire Cake that was Lion? It was barely supported by Apple (only made it to 10.7.5) and never really got any better. Mountain Lion didn't work on any of my hardware at the time so I was either stuck with Lion or forced to roll back to Snow Leopard. I used SL for as long as I could, then abandoned Apple software, running Linux on my last MacBooks (still have one 2009 MacBook model still functioning to this, thank goodness for replaceable batteries and third party OSes).
