Oh, this again. I should put a website with this up...

I was the person who personally ran 10.6 security updates at Apple (10.6.1+), the "DRI". My team in the Updates Program office and I reviewed every single bug to determine if it should go in a security and stability update or wait for the next major version. Seriously, every morning we group triaged all Mac OS X bugs, both incoming and those nominated internally for us to look at and determine if it should go in an update. I packaged and audited the builds and tuned the delta vs full updates. I built the system that largely automated diffing "trains" for software updates (automastering).

The new version of the OS was always being developed in a branch/train, and fixes were backported to the current version as they were found. They weren't developed linearly / one after another. So, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8. But if you are comparing major OS versions, Snow Leopard was different.

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.

The first .1 or .2 ALWAYS fixed critical bugs, because:

1. You had to GM / freeze the software to physically create the CDs/DVDs around a month before the release. Bugs found after this process required a repress (can't remember the phrase we used), which cost money and time and scrambled effort at the last minute and added risk. This means the bar was super high, and most "bad, but not can't use your computer bad" bugs were put in software updates...which was developed concurrently with the end of the main release (hence why .1 came out right away)

2. 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 was there too, but this blog post agrees with my memory.

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.

> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. That is a fact, not marketing.

That being a stated goal is not necessarily contradictory with claims that the release introduced bugs and had quality problems. Fixing bugs can introduce new bugs, or unveil existing bugs that were previously hidden by other bugs. It's quite possible that users like the author encountered bugs in their workflows that were the result of fixing bugs that didn't impact their workflows. It's also possible that they used applications that relied on behavior that was considered bugs in the OS, and thus broke when the bug was fixed.

> That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.

There was something else going on during that time period though.

Consumer operating systems in the 1990s were pretty bad. Windows 9x and MacOS Classic didn't even have protected memory. They crashed a lot.

Microsoft fixed this with Windows NT (delivered to consumers as Windows XP), Apple with BSD/NeXT (delivered as OS X). It was the point when ordinary people first got computer operating systems that were fully baked. But the earliest versions (Windows NT/2000 or NeXTSTEP/OS X pre-Snow Leopard) still had the problems that come with new code, so the later releases were better. Hence, the best version of MacOS was Snow Leopard and the best version of Windows was XP (or, depending on who you ask, 7). Because that's when they finally made a decent release.

Once we had operating systems that do essentially what operating systems are supposed to do, since then it has felt like nothing but lateral moves and deterioration because there wasn't much left on the table for newer versions to win but every update is another chance to break or lose something we used to have.

It was definitely a great release. I think that’s a big part of why it’s become legendary.

To me the myth is the “no new features”. Apple may have said that in places in marketing but there were new features. Grand Central Dispatch for example.

But in the legend that fact is lost.

Thank you! Finally, someone with insider knowledge telling the real story.

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[0]. 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.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1172/

> So, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8.

Thank you for admitting that.

> Snow Leopard was the first release of this kind

Also the last, apparently.