Mar 19, 2025
The same year Apple launched the iPhone, it unveiled a massive upgrade to Mac OS X known as Leopard, sporting “300 New Features.” Two years later, it did something almost unheard of: it released Snow Leopard, an upgrade all about how little it added and how much it took away. Apple needs to make it snow again.
Snow Leopard did what it was made to do. It was one of the most solid software releases Apple ever put out. I’d say one of the best modern operating system releases, period.
After Apple’s frenetic run of overhauling and quickly iterating on the entire Mac platform in the early 2000s, becoming a major technology player again with the iPod, moving the Mac to a new processor architecture (for the second of three times) and releasing the iPhone, it was time for detail work. 2009’s Snow Leopard was understated, but improved the underlying system while shrinking it in size by removing outdated accretions.
In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?), releasing an OS upgrade without huge new features was unusual. But, it was the right idea and cemented one of the best eras of the Mac.
Nowadays, Apple includes the system upgrades in the upfront cost of its computers, so the incentive to constantly roll out ten or twenty or three hundred “new features” should be lower. Inexplicably, since the company adopted that no extra charge, yearly release cadence, it has seemingly been more reticent to do a disciplined “Snow” release, no matter how necessary.
The latest releases — MacOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18 — are screaming for such a reset. Yes, they work and are still smoother and less glitchy than Windows 11, but they feel like software developed by people who don’t actually use that software. In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in.
Some bugs are inevitable with major releases, sure. The troubling aspect is that many are easily reproducible across devices and show up in high-traffic areas, not just forgotten nooks. How do Apple’s engineers not notice these problems?
Take Messages. Apple’s iMessage and SMS tool is an essential app for communication for me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Apple users. Since the release of Sequoia last fall, one can no longer reliably cut or copy text from the Mac app. Attempting to copy a message bubble is a game of roulette: the message may copy or it may not. Who knows until you try to paste! Select te
40 Comments
asadotzler
I don't think that's quite right. Snow Leopard was a lot of changes to a lot of the OS code base and wasn't great out of the gate, taking multiple dot releases, like all large-scale software updates do, to stabilize and bugfix enough to be "good."
There is no silver bullet, just a lot of lead ones and the answer to Apple's quality problem is to begin baking QA back into the process in a meaningful way after letting it atrophy for the last decade or so.
Hire more humans and rely less on automation. Trust your developers, QA, and user support folks and the feedback they push up the chain of command. Fix bugs as the arise instead of assigning them to "future" or whatever. Don't release features until they're sufficient stable.
This is all basic stuff for a software company, stuff that Apple seems to have forgotten under the leadership of that glorified accountant, Cook.
mberning
Hard to disagree. You would think for a company obsessed with performance per watt and battery life that every release would be as fast if not faster that its predecessor and more efficient to boot.
andrewmcwatters
…and speaking of Snow versions, bring back those cool welcome videos when you first purchase a Mac!
I miss those. Unfortunately, since Apple doesn't do the whole space theme anymore, you'd probably get some really boring drone shots of California at best before a Setup Assistant faded into view from behind a Redwood or something.
geerlingguy
> In the 22 years since I became a “switcher”, this is the worst state I can remember Apple’s platforms being in.
Indeed, I remember three times when Apple went a bit overboard on the feature front, but dialed it back and made some of the most stable and useful OS versions:
OS 8.5/8.6 pushed a bunch of features and were the last big pushes pre-OSX, but then OS 9 fixed a TON of bugs, and added a few smaller quality of life improvements that made running 'Classic' Mac OS pretty good, for those who were stuck on it for the transitional years.
Mac OS X 10.0 rewrote _everything_, and especially 10.0 was _dog_ slow, with all the new Quartz graphics stuff in an era where GPU accelerated 3D display widgets wasn't quite prevalent. 10.1 patched in a bunch of missing features (like DVD Player—it was still a pretty useful tool back then), and fixed a couple of the most glaring problems… but 10.4 Tiger was the first OS X release that was 'fast' enough OS X was a joy to use in the same way OS 9 was at the time. At least on newer Macs.
And then of course Snow Leopard, which is the subject of the OP.
macOS 13/14/15 have progressively added more little bugs I track in my https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook project; anything from little networking bugs to weird preferences that can't be automated, or don't even work at all when you try toggling them.
That's besides the absolute _disaster_ that is modern System Preferences. Until the 'great iOSification' a few years back, Apple's System Preferences and preference pane were actually a pleasure to use, and I could usually remember where to go visually, with a nice search assistant.
Now… it's hit or miss if I can even find a setting :(
123sereusername
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karel-3d
Ahh Apple Vision Pro.
I entirely forgot it existed! They still sell that?
rcarmo
There are some factual "gaps" there about how good Snow Leopard was, but I understand the sentiment. As someone who's been a Mac user since System 6 and has been consistently using Macs alongside PCs _daily_ for over 20 years I can say that Apple's software quality (either in terms of polish or just plain QA) has steadily decreased.
It's just that me and other old-time switchers have stopped complaining about it and moved on (taoofmac.com, my blog, was started when I wrote a few very popular switcher guides, and even though I kept using the same domain name I see myself as a UNIX guy, not "just" a Mac user).
For me, Spotlight is no longer (anywhere) near as useful to find files (and sometimes forgets app and shortcut names it found perfectly fine 5 minutes ago), and there is no longer any way to effectively prioritize the results I want (apps, not internet garbage).
Most of the other examples in the article also apply, but to be honest I've been using GNOME in parallel for years now and I consider it to be my "forever desktop" if PC hardware can ever match Apple Silicon (or, most likely, if I want something that is _just a computer_).
keyle
I've said this many times, snow leopard is still my favourite OS today. If you could add iMessages to it, although not necessary, it would be perfect.
Of course today it would be insecure, missing security patches etc. SSL…
parkcedar
Another example was High Sierra. They completely swapped out the file system on that release, focusing primarily on under-the-hood changes, and imo was also one of the most stable macOS releases to date.
themagician
This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.
I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.
I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?
_s
Not just their software, the hardware is beginning to be get pretty unwieldily complicated.
From an OS / software perspective:
Have a "core" macOS that has none of the apps / integrations are baked in at an OS level.
You install the things you want, how you want – eg iMessage, Mail, and then iCloud if you want to sync it, and Photos etc.
Have a slim, fast, stable OS that I can just turn on and get going with.
From the hardware perspective, I made this comment a little while ago but what I want to be able to choose is:
– Device: Watch, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, iMac, Mac
– Size: Mini, "Normal / Default" (Air), Max
– Processing Power: "Normal / Default", Pro, Ultra
– And maybe storage.
That way I can go and buy a MacBook Pro (13"?), or a MacBook Max Pro (15"), or a MacBook Mini (11"), or a normal iPad Mini Ultra, or an iMac Mini (21"?), or a Watch Pro, or a Mac Max Ultra etc.
Device + Size + Power.
It's kinda there, but not quite.
pavel_lishin
> I am not suggesting Apple has fallen behind Windows or Android. Changing a setting on Windows 11 can often involve a journey through three or four different interface designs, artifacts of half-implemented changes dating back to the last century. Whenever I find myself stuck outside of Appleland, I am eager to return “home,” flaws and all.
Hard agree with this. I sometimes have to boot up a windows laptop to play Minecraft with the kiddo, and it never stops reminding me how little I know about Windows now, how counter-intuitive everything is, how everything feels designed for a user whose mind I cannot comprehend.
lapcat
See my blog post "The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard": https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2023/11/5.html
TL;DR What people remember fondly is not Mac OS X 10.6.0, which was in fact very buggy, and buggier than 10.5.8, but rather later versions of Snow Leopard after almost 2 full years of bug fixes.
See also "Snow Leopard bug deletes all user data": https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/snow-leopard-bug-d…
The yearly release cycle is the problem. Apple needs "another Snow Leopard" only in the sense that I mentioned above, "almost 2 full years of bug fixes", although at this point, Apple has more than 2 years of technical debt.
joshka
From a features perspective, they should acqui-hire either Alfred or Raycast and build that functionality into spotlight.
basisword
I feel like they're trying to build too many platforms most of which have become quite large. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, visionOS, watchOS, tvOS. The fact all of these systems are quite tightly linked in terms of features/syncing makes it difficult to navigate. If you want to ship every single year you need more developers, but that might make the collaboration between the systems more difficult. They need to move away from the one year cycle. It's a stupidly short period of time to ship a whole OS (or 6 whole OS's). If you want to keep them all in sync switch to two year cycles and decouple some of the apps from the core OS (e.g. Music, Safari, etc) so they can be updated as necessary outside of the cycle.
spudlyo
I'm done with macOS, I've migrated to Linux for my general purpose computing. With every new release of macOS, Gatekeeper is becoming harder and harder to bypass, increasing Apple's control over what software can be run on macOS, forcing apps to be signed with an Apple Developer ID. While I'm happy they are taking security seriously, I'm seriously creeped out that macOS sends hashes of every executable I run to their cloud. It's starting to feel like a broader move away from the openness of personal computing and towards a more controlled, appliance-like software experience.
When Sequoia eliminated the ability to override Gatekeeper by control-clicking, it became clear to me that Apple is now employing a frog boiling strategy towards their ultimate goal — more control of the software you can run on their hardware.
egypturnash
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Macha
One thing that has been slowly creeping in is a little bit of a Microsoft-like "you will use our feature", like launching apple music every time I hit headphone controls, or nagging me to turn on reactions every time I start a video call. In some ways that's more annoying than the outright bugs, as they could choose not to be that way and market themselves as not being that way.
silvr
Agree. Apple needs to clean up shop – MacOS has been egregiously worsening year over year. Some features like Universal Control and Continuity Camera are legitimately awesome, but they do not make up for the INSANELY slow System Settings app that gets harder to navigate with each release and which has >2s wait times for the right pane to respond to a change in the left pane. Steve Jobs would have fired the person responsible for that overhaul three years ago, it's embarrassing. Messages too needs a ground-up rewrite. Getting more elaborate emoji tapbacks doesn't make up for fundamental instability and poor syncing behavior. C'mon!
heavymetalpoizn
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mistyvales
I'm enjoying Sorbet Leopard on my 20 year old Dual Core PowerPC tower. Mostly just messing around with old versions of Max making weird sounds.. but when I do interact with the OS it feels great and responsive and a joy to use. Modern MacOS can feel that way if you turn off a lot of crap. I don't even sync my accounts to the OS anymore.
Andaith
They need a Snow-IOS too.
– Ever since I've updated to the latest iOS 18, my watch complications(weather doodad) stop working randomly because they just lose the location services permission. Then in settings, the location services permission list acts like the weather app isn't installed.
– The new Mail app now automatically classifies your email, but still gives you the "All Mail" option. But the unread count badge on the app only works off of what they classify as your "Priority" mail. There's a setting to change that, so that it shows you the unread count of ALL mail, not just priority mail, but when you change that setting nothing changes. This is my biggest problem with new iOS.
– Keyboard sometimes doesn't get out the way any more when it should.
These are just off the top of my head. It used to be such a nice, polished experience. Their competition was just outclassed. Now, when my phone dies I'm going to have a good look at all the other options.
ohgr
I don't think it does. Long term Apple user here (since 2007). I'm typing this on a 5 year old pile of junk with Windows 11 LTSC on it. The (M4) Mac is sitting next to me acting as an SMB server until I can be bothered to get all my stuff out of it. It's just tiring using a Mac these days. It's difficult to explain but everything feels slightly frustrating. The nice things are really nice. The whole experience is quite nice. Until you hit a problem. Then it's a complete pit of pain and misery and there just aren't enough ways out of it.
Had a few issues with iCloud syncing and data loss as well and what with being based in the UK and the general problems with geopolitics and the cloud I figured I'd try and get as much stuff out of iCloud as possible. Well there's not much advantage now. Most of it is in the ecosystem tie in, not the hardware. And on top of that the provisioned services such as Apple Music are just pain for me on a daily basis. My entire music catalogue disappeared in a puff of smoke when I was offline for nearly a week. The one thing I wanted it for!
So back to the PC. I ran out of disk space on the (soldered in SSD) Mac. I can't delete anything and macOS has leaked out about 20gb suddenly. I don't know what this is other than about 5 gig of it is Apple Intelligence despite telling it to fuck off. So it's late Friday afternoon and I need to get something done so I can have a clear weekend. I dig in the junk cupboard and find a couple of hard disks but no way of connecting them to the USB-C only Mac. Amazon solutions aren't available for delivery until Sunday. There upon I discovered the kids' "covid work PC" for when they were home studying. Despite the acceptable 16Gb of RAM it only had a meagre 256Gb disk in it. No worries. Opened it up and there's a hole for an SSD in it. It now has +500Gb SSD. Brilliant. On goes windows 11 LTSC. I'm back up running R in under an hour and have transferred all the data over.
I never went back. It feels better here. This thing is a swiss army knife. And extension of me. Not the other way round like on the Mac. The Mac feels like it feeds off me: both cash and energy. Apple need to fix that.
notShabu
what are some good alternatives to mac os? there some features like image/text copy-paste being cross device that are insanely useful that make it hard to switch
clumsysmurf
> I could walk item by item through System Settings and point out many equally inexplicable decisions. Did anyone at Apple really believe a Mac user’s life would be better if common features were buried deep in menus?
I have to agree with this, System Settings seems very inconsistent (design) and has terrible information architecture / organization.
runjake
It should be noted that Snow Leopard was pretty buggy until several versions in.
Our memory is a lot rosier than the reality.
aresant
It is literally insane that when I search for Photos on iOS I can't zoom in to make the thumbnails bigger. As an approaching mid-40s person this is untenable, even worse that it DOES let you zoom in prior to search.
ryukoposting
I clicked this because I was confused why someone felt so strongly about Apple needing a winterized SUV.
tonymet
Apple needs to restore primacy to the UI. MacOS and iOS used to feel non-blocking with a UI that would always respond regardless of how long a remote or long-running background task required.
Now iOS and MacOS feel sluggish and slothlike, waiting on IO, typically from a remote call. The webdevs have taken over.
Yes they need to remove cruft, and also re-hire the ruthless UI Nazis who would enforce 120hz responsiveness at all cost.
ilrwbwrkhv
I don't think it's just an Apple thing. I think it's just a big company thing. For example, the YouTube app has so many errors in the very common path, such as opening comments on channels and so on. I think after a while big companies simply become hollow from the inside and self-combust. Just like large animals have a cancer protection gene, I think there is a max size companies can get before they sell combust and they do not have a cancer preventing gene.
stmw
Great post.
BTW, there is an (earlier) example of Snow Leopard in the Microsoft ecosystem — that would be Windows XP, which similarly avoided major new subsystems and new applications built-into-the-OS, but was remarkably fast and stable for its time.
CuriousRose
I am totally invested in the Apple ecosystem, which on principle I'm against (closed systems never sat right with me), but at the time (beginning ~2015) the products and services were so well integrated and genuinely improved my life it was hard to see how things could ever get this bad. I'd still never (ever) go back to Windows, and Linux doesn't have the same feel or ease of setup as macOS, but I am genuinely, deeply concerned about this trajectory for Apple. Albeit super opinionated, but I feel that macOS was the saviour of modern aesthetic computing especially when Windows started its rapid decline post 7. I’m fine trading some frustration—like extra steps for untrusted software—if it keeps macOS secure and fast, free of Windows-level adware or telemetry. But right now, macOS has never been in a worse state.
I recently emailed Tim expressing the same concerns as the article and regarding specific issues with Messages and Mail resource usage and was surprised to get a response from Craig requesting more information and sysdiagnose files, but this is where feedback ended unfortunately.
The current state of the macOS UI is atrocious, devices don't all need the same button shape or menu UX flow across all devices as they are inherently interacted with differently. A Mac isn’t an iPad — why force the same rounded buttons and simplified menus on both? They’re interacted with differently: keyboard and mouse versus touch. I have no idea why this is so difficult for execs to understand or important for them to change. Software teams at Apple are so lucky to have the Apple Silicon innovation on the hardware side, Intel Macs would catch fire on boot-up running any of the latest releases given how atrocious the resource usage is.
While I'm here whinging, the iOS swipe keyboard is garbage (almost totally unusable now) where before it was perfect with the innovative predictive hit-box expansion pioneered by Ken Kocienda. I think that's now been replaced with AI prediction which in 2025 I don't understand why it can be so embarrassingly bad. I had to upgrade to the iPhone Max recently to hit the letters properly. Also Apple I never want to tell someone to "duck off".
Initially I was understanding, but quite frankly now I'm just pissed that it has gotten to this stage, and there is no indication of resolution from execs about these issues.
I’m starting to worry that Apple could go off the deep-end – the way of Microsoft – coasting on hardware sales while letting software quality slide (albeit seeming intentional from Microsoft's side of the fence). I get it — software isn’t where the money is, hardware drives the business – but the two are inseparable BY DESIGN. When macOS struggles with basic functionality, it undermines the value of the Mac itself.
nixpulvis
Apple needs a Snow Apple. Fire Tim, bring in some real change.
crossroadsguy
This alone says a lot about Apple's software "prowess", i.e perennial customer hostility combined with clear incompetence, (in which their "core" customer base has by now becomes participants in some kind of Stockholm syndrome scenario), that an attempted de-shittification of their OS is being hailed as (nostalgia tinted?) greatness :)
physhster
Apple is becoming like Google, everything is slightly broken and nobody cares, because fixing stuff doesn't get you promoted…
airstrike
Wow, that 2013 WWDC video is so incredibly impactful. I had no idea I was going to experience what I did when I hit play. It resonates with me so strongly, I honestly wasn't ready for it.
Dave_Rosenthal
Huh, I was actually on this page a few years ago, but iOS and MacOS quality has been super solid for me this past year. Anyone else feel this way? Judging by the nodding comments maybe I’m just the outlier?
onemoresoop
Been looking for a windows replacement and probably will just stick to some linux distro. I had hoped Apple was better…
w10-1
Snow leopard was, as you said, necessary in anticipation of the architecture change.
Now there's no such change, but instead AI, this weird new cross-cutting but fuzzy function touching everything that no one has ever used reliably at the scale of Apple devices. AI is impossible to reliably test, and all-too-easy to get embarrassing results. I'm glad Apple recently tamped expectations.
The relatively loose concurrency model in Apple's ARM has made it rival the network in introducing new failure modes Many quality issues cited have their root causes in those two sources of indeterminacy.
Amplifying these are the organizational boundaries driving software flaws. Siri as a separate organization with its own network-dependent stack is just not viable for scattering AI. Boosting revenue with iCloud services makes all roads run through the servers in Rome, amplifying network and backend reliability issues. I also suspect outsourcing quality and the maintenance of legacy software has reduced the internal quality signal and cemented technical boundaries, as the delegates protect their work streams and play quality theater. The yearly on-schedule cadence makes things worse because they can always play for time and wait for the next train.
And frankly (to borrow a concept from Java land), Apple might be reaching peak complexity. With hundreds of apps sporting tens of settings, there is simply no way to have a fast-path to the few things different people need. Deep linking is a workaround, but it's up to the app or user to figure that out. (And it makes me livid: I can't count how many important calls I've missed by failing to turn off "Silence unknown callers", with the Phone app settings buried 3 layers deep ON MY PHONE)
A short-term solution I think is not a rewrite but concierge UI setup: come to the store, tell the "geniuses" exactly what you need, and make shortcuts + myUI or whatever is necessary to enable them to make it happen. Then automate that process with AI.
That's something they can deliver continuously. Their geniuses can drive feature-development, and it can be rolled out to stores weekly and — heavens! — rolled back just as quickly. Customers and employees get the excitement of seeing their feature in action.
The model of sensitive form-factor designers working in quiet respectful collaboration to produce new curves every year is just wrong for today's needs. All those people standing around at Apple stores should instead be spending an hour or more with each existing customer designing new features, and they should be rewarded for features that take, and especially for features that AI can incorporate.
On the development side, any one should be able to contribute to any new feature, and be rewarded for it. At least for this work, there would be no more silos, and no massive work streams creating moral hazards.
The goal is to make software and a software development process that scales and adapts. It may start at 5% of new UI features, but I hope it infects and challenges the entire organization and stack.
Granted, it will take a famously hub organization and turn it into a web of hubs, but that in itself may be necessary for Apple to build the next generation of managers.
Look for how today's challenges can help you build tomorrow's organizations.
thr0away
Apple has gone from
Company I loved to the one I hate! They are the new Microsoft! They have hired a bunch of idiots in their security team who are driving their user base insane! They can completely lock you out of all your devices with no recourse! I am starting to move away from this pathetic company”s products!