I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule. I also don’t know what he’s looking for, as someone who worked at Apple during this time quality improved substantially in 10.6 Snow Leopard and continued. Most bug fixes don’t get a marketing line item or even much fanfare. We were all users of what the OSX guys were doing and lived on the dogfood while we made our own mistakes on iOS.

As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation. When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated.

> don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule.

Call me an old man, but I'm no longer sure that annual major OS upgrades are even desirable.

Adding features is great, but half of the changes feel like product manager brain "changes to show we made changed things".

I actually don't need buttons moved around in photos/mail/finder annually. I don't need the design language of the windows changed annually. I don't need the icons of all my apps to change annually.

An OS is a tool that serves the purpose of granting me access to all my other tools (apps).

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule.

Snow Leopard was a refinement of Leopard, and both releases had unusually long durations as the newest release of Mac OS X, totaling 4 years. It then continued getting security updates until late 2013, another 2 years after Lion replaced it. I can see how people would treat the later point releases of Snow Leopard as a high point for stability because of the years of bug fixes that had gone into the system by then.

> As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service - anew features. It cannot just be quality, but quality is table stakes and the minimum expectation.

I don't know anybody who's switched to Mac because of a feature they added in the latest OS release. It's always because of the better price-performance, the better battery life, or because Windows got too glitchy and annoying. The only new Mac OS feature from the past few years that I can even name off the top of my head is when they finally added window snapping with Sequoia.

> When things get out of hand organizationally it makes sense to call for a snow leopard, but it comes at great cost so you better make big changes in the system so the same mistakes are not repeated

What about the recent macOS releases that seem to prioritize dubious features (Apple Intelligence) that don't add a lot of value (and don't work well), while botching the core fundamentals of UI design and functionality, as with the UI disaster that was Liquid Glass (not to mention the broken window resize region, inconsistent spacing and corner radii, menu items being hidden under the notch, the off-center Windows menu, scrollbars that are either invisible or hard to target, etc.) Liquid Glass was inexcusable as it opposed the fundamental UI principles of clarity and legibility. Apple basically ignored its own design principles.

> As I age I realize you need to entice the user with more value and service

When companies use to charge for OS … and the releases were staggered by 3-4 years, I would have agreed.

But when OS upgrades are free, and happen yearly - there’s a different user expectation.

> I don’t necessarily agree with Jeff Johnson’s conclusion that major software upgrades are impossible on an annual schedule.

I'm not sure this is a good place to debate my article when the author of the submitted article merely linked to mine.

It appears that Ruben Schade downgraded to 10.5 from 10.6.2, which was still pretty early in the Snow Leopard cycle, then "tried it again a few months later" and downgraded again, until 10.7 Lion (which I personally hated and skipped on my main Mac). Thus, Schade never experienced the later versions of Snow Leopard that everyone remembers fondly.

There’s red flags I look for in articles like this, and a FreeBSD partition on your MacBook Pro is one of them. Tells me the author is probably hypercritical of MacOS because it’s not a GPL OS. That’s fine, but as someone who likes MacOS, I don’t share the pessimism.

Snow Leopard was a great experience for me. So much more stable, and the OS felt tighter, like lots of the little wonky things got sorted out. It well deserves its credit and more operating systems should focus on bug fix releases once in a while.