Snow Leopard Lore
This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped.
The reality was a bit different. As I wrote at the time[…]
People conflate a bunch of different ideas when talking about Snow Leopard:
- Were there really zero no features? No, but there were fewer user-facing ones.
- Was the initial release especially low in bugs? No, but it was better than Leopard’s.
- Did it feel faster? Yes.
- Was the final release especially low in bugs? Yes, it was fantastic.
- Was it just because of the longer release cycle before Lion? No, they really did focus on quality for the initial release. And they didn’t add as much stuff mid-cycle as they did with Tiger and Leopard.
Snow Leopard’s stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing. I am not sure why people on the internet don’t believe that, but I was there. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval from leadership and the bar was high. In normal feature releases it operated bottom up “here is what we are planning to ship” and in Snow Leopard it was top down “can we ship this?”.
AFAIK Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind (the first release I worked on was Jaguar or Puma), and was a direct response to taking 8 software updates to stabilize 10.5 and the severity of the bugs found during that cycle and the resulting bad press. Leopard was a HUGE feature release and with it came tons of (bad) bugs.
[…]
Testing was basically engineers, internal QA, some strategic partners like Adobe and MS, and the Apple Seed program (which was tiny). There was very little automated testing. Apple employees are not representative of the population and QA coverage is never very complete. And we sometimes held back features from seed releases when we were worried about leaks, so it wasn’t even the complete OS that was being tested.
Software updates are always needed, though the issues they fix became less severe over time due to larger seeds (aka betas), recovery partitions, and better / more modern development practices. But I can tell you FOR A FACT that Snow Leopard had fewer major bugs over its lifetime, coalesced very quickly, and was extremely solid when Lion was released.
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.
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 my feels at the time). Many new frameworks in Leopard did not land or get stable until very late in the development cycle which meant everything downstream had to scramble right before GM. It was 100% the case that Leopard was not really stable until 10.5.8 and still sucked IMHO.
There was a lot of clean-up needed in MacOS and that was Snow Leopard. It was not a perfect release but 10.6.3 (the second disc pressing IIRC) and onward were very stable. Dropping PowerPC support really helped focus QA since they didn’t need the massive array of test hardware Tiger and Leopard required. You also didn’t need to wrangle builds for four architectures, including multiple compilers as a few libraries (if not whole frameworks) were compiled with ICC on x86 for performance reasons. The “Snow Leopard wasn’t that great” meme is weird. I’m sure it had its problems like every OSX release did. Unfortunately most OSX releases broke someone’s workflow. Snow Leopard ware no different. But it was always billed internally as a “no new features” release and those features that it did ship faced a very high bar to get in the release. I definitely look back on Snow Leopard as a high water mark for macOS quality in terms of a release.
Previously:
- “If You Can’t Stand By a Feature, You Shouldn’t Launch It.”
- Glow Leopard
- Snow Leopard at 15
- The Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
- A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
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OK, I'll be the jerk…
Compare macOS (and I[Pad]OS) development since Snow Leopard to Windows 7>8>10>11 and Linux. Apple's decision to move to a year-over-year dev cycle has been disastrous. Meanwhile, Windows still sucks, but short of Microsoft pulling some Apple-moves and (arguably) artificially cleaving off older machines, Windows has enjoyed some pretty good consistency for a VERY long time (we shall ignore Windows 8 and 8.1, whatever that was, for the sake of argument). And Linux has all but demolished Apple (and Microsoft, for that matter) everywhere except for desktop and mobile (and no, that's not "just server"… people who say that aren't paying attention). Linux has, IMHO, been the second most impressive development in my lifetime, behind Apple's work on "GUI" (which means "Macintosh"… but certainly NOT 'Liquid Glass'). I just wish Linus had been more intrigued by Plan 9; and it is, again IMHO, shameful that Apple didn't end up doing more to advance the 'state of the art' with personal computer operating systems. (Apple, in the '2nd Coming', threw away more technological advancements—OpenDoc, Xgrid, etc—than they have since 'invented'. And we're still stuck with all the stupid security trappings of 1980s Unix, and Apple runs their most-sold device, effectively, in single-user mode because… well… just because. 'Convenience'.)
Sigh. I saw a quote the other day that kinda struck me: “I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.” It was from the series finale of 'The Office', spoken by (Ed Helms playing) Andy Bernard. What's terrible is I watched that episode, was a 'The Office' fan… and I didn't remember that quote. Seems… apropos. Apple has lost something… lost a LOT, I fear. And while sales success and massive amounts of cash have (perhaps) masked that, in this industry we all should know that neither are 'long-term security'.
@Scott, good comment.
My background never included Linux, so move that aside. Windows? Started with 3.1 (of course), moved on professionally to Windows 95, and ended about the time Windows 8 was probably in RC mode. (Whatever happened to Windows 9? And please, let's not forget about how poor both Windows 98 and Windows XP were. Particularly XP.
As for Apple? Whatever came before ProDOS (Apple DOS?) was on my first Apple hardware - Apple IIc. Never used or owned a Macintosh (I still believe it was spelled MacIntosh with an upper case I back in 1984) until 2004, so those classic OS versions I know nothing about. Panther was where I begin, so I can't even speak UI elements being lickable or MSFT saving Apple from bankruptcy or simply Carbon versus Cocoa (at least from a Mac developer's perspective).
FIrst, I totally agree - this yearly release cycle, while possibly feasible with i[Pad]OS - great way to name it! - is a complete disaster regards to macOS. Maybe the pendulum isn't yet done moving with these monthly dot releases (think AI security patches). But one can hope that with, what five (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Watch, Vision) different OS to maintain, maybe they'll see the need for a few to back off to a two year cycle.
I cannot fathom an iPhone that supports multiple users. So now instead of a passcode, you have a login screen? Maybe go all in and force a password change every X days? People are to, um, mobile when using their phones. (Maybe now I should mention I've never used an Android-based phone. Have they found a way to support multi-users?)
I'm too old and my memory fails to remember - Snow Leopard only came on a CD-ROM. I know Leopard did. But before these downloadable updates, how did dot releases get distributed? I totally believe that downloading all OS upgrades directly is a win-win. Apple doesn't waste $$$ on CD_ROMs (in fact who here misses internal CD-ROM or DVD drives?) and we get immediate upgrades that do not involve USPS.
When were these good old days? For me, music-wise it was 1975-83. For computers? As one who devoured the ProDOS manual (complete with source code and inline comments) in 1984, it's not so easy. Each OS has its moments. They also have their issues. As a iOS app hobbyist (note not really trying to make $$$) I'd say 2014-2016. Swift (not SwiftUI, please) and CoreImage (including being able to create my own CIFilters all the way down to writing GLSL code) is closest. But - if you can get past Liquid Glass - and focus on their hardware, moving on from Intel to the M1-M5 (soon to be M6 and M7) may be it. I'm also happy that no Apple Silicon hardware featured a butterfly keyboard!
