Michael Steeber, 9to5Mac:
Following the news that Apple had refocused their plans for iOS 12 around stability and performance over new features, many were quick to liken the move to a “Snow Leopard release” of iOS. In recent years, the phrase has reached mythological status in the Apple community, a catch-all referring to stable software and “the good ol’ days” of the Mac.
But how did this perception develop? Was Mac OS X Snow Leopard really the gold standard of software releases, an undefeated champion in the halls of computing history?
This is a fascinating look at the history of Apple and software reliability. It pairs well with the Axios story Apple delays iOS features to focus on reliability, performance and Michael Tsai’s response.
Michael Tsai:
I think the real difference is that, with more time between major releases, there was less churn, and there was time for things to settle down before the next major release upended everything again. The last few versions of each cycle got to be really good, and you could stick with them until the next version settled down. Some people stayed with 10.6.8 for multiple whole cycles. (There was also less pressure to update then.) Last fall, if Sierra was buggy for you, the choice was between sticking with a release you weren’t happy with or rolling the dice on High Sierra, which included significant fixes but also introduced new problems of its own.
Nothing is ever rock solid. But there are certainly many shades of grey between rock solid and terribly buggy. And Apple’s reputation is critical to their continued success. Apple cannot allow their brand to tarnish (or at least to become synonymous with terribly buggy). That’d be the ball game.
10.6.8 worked very well for me. The appearance of 10.7 was more or less the first time I remember hearing increased criticism about OS releases that either introduced UI changes that made too little sense to me, or didn’t otherwise sound quite fully baked. I believe I skipped at least that one, if not the next two. 10.9 was a relatively stable place to land until support for it was dropped.
10.6.8 worked very well for me, too.
The previous releases of 10.6? Not so much.
Considering I still have one person in my department using 10.6.8 and I never hear a peep from her about problems of any kind? Yes, it is the most stable OS Apple ever delivered.
Yeah, like anyone unfortunate enough to have to work with Windows servers (SMB) and High Sierra. I had users who were having to force shutdown and reboot seven or eight times a day. Try to save a file on the server, Finder goes Bye Bye! like a hamster off the old QT3D roller coaster, and nothing works other than holding down the power switch. (hell, even ‘sudo shutdown -r now’ in Terminal didn’t work. How the HELL you make a Unix-based system that unstable is beyond me…)
Just fucking indefensible. If Apple wants to be taken seriously they have to work with the rest of the world, and this has long been a game of two steps forward, one back. Just FIX what you’re shipping before you go on to the new version.
I waited until January 2018 to migrate from Yosemiti to El Capitan. I was installing some very old software along with the newer to be compatible with some of my customer’s workflows. So, I installed Snow Leopard First. Then, I installed Office 2008 and InDesign CS3 and Adobe CS6 and ran all of the updates. After that, I installed El Capitan on top of Snow Leopard. It’s all very stable as long as I don’t install Font Agent Pro 6.5. I did have to install a legacy version of Java to get InDesign CS3 to work. El Capitan is much faster than Yosemiti and it’s the last operating system that will support my older 64bit memory architecture Mac Pro and Macbook Pro.
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