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Snow Leopard was the greatest OS update of my lifetime. That was the only year I went to WWDC and they were handing out the DVD as I was waiting in line. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES (except some support for MS Exchange). There is a concept -- release an OS that makes your machine more stable and faster -- nothing else. Rock solid OS. That was pinnacle of all OS updates.
NO NEW FEATURES was totally marketing that just went along with not changing the UI. Like you said they added Grand Central Dispatch and Exchange support, they rewrote Finder in Cocoa, released QuickTime X, OpenCL support, and introduced the Mac App Store. They also made significant updates to BootCamp, Safari, and ported stuff to 64-bit. It also had a data loss bug with guest accounts that was later fixed in a point release.

I do think it ended up being a great release, but I don't attribute it to "no new features." I think being the 6th or 7th major release, 3rd with Intel support, 6 years of support, mixed with good release planning and engineering, and luck helped it be so beloved.

Totally agree! I really hope Apple does another modern Snow Leopard type of update with no new features -- just optimizations. Although, going from Big Sur on an Intel Mac to an M1 Mac _felt_ similar -- everything is just snappy.
"Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES"

run that past me again please

While it looks dated, SL has a far more intuitive UI, in my opinion. I don't recall any major issues with this release. It seemed to "just work." Big Sur seems like a toy by comparison.

An anecdote, I still remember installing Snow Leopard on my Polybook; it was the first OS update since switching to a Mac. I received the physical delivery since it was still distributed by disc, so I left my house. I was able to install it a few hours later while waiting on an appointment sitting in the car, all while on battery power! It was like magic.

I actually like the look of Big Sur, but the bugs... oh god the bugs.

That new notification center looks real nice. Shame my first experience with it has been it repeatedly hanging, gobbling up RAM and CPU cycles, and generally not displaying notifications.

(Extra fun if it hangs while notifications are still on screen; then they just sit there forever. 'pkill NotificationCenter' has been my friend lately.)

For me SL was one of greatest release of OS X.

It's so easy and sleek that i miss good old times!

I agree Big Sur is a big step back. They've changed all the icons in System Preferences again, and the new sound-levels UI in the menubar is very confusing.
I’m amazed at how clear each UI element is from the background. Borders are apparently deemed uncool by today’s standards.

In pretty much every other discipline, we would engage in objective discussion about it.

Also, why do we need trends in Design? Borders, separators, visible scrollbars have a particular era they belong to like fashion or music? It makes no sense. I can understand color palettes and such as part of an era's esthetic. We can take creative liberty there.

It would be fun to interview the director of UX/UI at Apple and ask them why is 2013 UI worse than today? What specifically is wrong with 1990’s UI? What about 1980’s?

The ever shrinking and disappearing UI chrome is a trend that drives me crazy. Windows 10 programs essentially have no borders anymore which makes overlapping windows much more difficult to discern. Then there’s the design trend of hiding things like buttons and borders until you give it keyboard or mouse focus which is awful for discoverability. Then there’s the trend of disappearing scroll bars.

This article showed just how much craftsmanship and thought there was in earlier versions of Mac OS. Sure there was plenty to grouse about (even though much of the maligned OS X skeuomorphism didn’t seem as present here) but a lot of the fundamentals were extraordinary.

I really miss Snow Leopard and the direction things were going back then. It felt like an advanced operating system that was easy to use. Modern iterations of MacOS feels more like they're trying to make it look good, while making the interface "simpler". Simpler as in showing fewer UI elements and settings, but if you want to actually use those elements and change those settings, it's many steps back.
Back in the day operating systems had advanced features for those who needed them.

Nowadays everything is optimized for idiots and functionality that requires more than 2 brain cells to operate is actively being removed, and replaced by liberal amounts of whitespace.

This isn't specific to Mac even. Windows (and to a certain extent Linux with Gnome 3) is also affected.

I once administered an office where all the machines ran Snow Leopard, which meant I had plenty of time that would normally go to user support available for more interesting skill development. Best OS of all time.
Then came Lion and every secretary wanted to kill someone because of the stupid "Save As" alterations.

"Open document, make changes, print, discard document changes" no longer worked. This error was bad.

> Two usable browsers in Snow Leopard are: Firefox 45.9.0ESR, Opera 25.0.1614.71

Ew, no, don't do that! Use InterWeb, which is compatible with many more websites, and gets security updates. https://randommacstuff.blogspot.com/p/interweb-browser.html

On 10.7 – 10.9, you can actually use a branch of Chromium. It's unofficial, but completely up-to-date, and will work with every site. It's my daily driver. https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-legacy

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think macOS/Mac OS has added much in the way of UI enhancements for desktop usage since 10.6.

And by desktop usage, I mean, literally, using a computer on a desk with a mouse and keyboard.

They have absolutely made some nice enhancements when using a laptop with a trackpad. And obviously there’s many under-the-hood improvements. But in terms of old-school I-have-a-mouse grey-beard users like me? Meh.

This, of course, makes sense as a priority, given they sell so so many laptops.

It is a little disappointing seeing the utilities folder populated with the same dusty apps they were 20 years ago. I don't want them to go away—I want new stuff. Give me features and more tooling without feeling like something is being taken away in the process.
They added a lot of features in 10.7/8 that I really like. Autosave is the biggest one for me—particularly alongside the integrated revision history—and notification center is super convenient. Remember when everything had to use Growl?

I would agree with you if we were talking about 10.9, though.

There's been a bunch of quality of life improvements over the years. Dark mode, file renaming by clicking the window title, Mission Control is more feature rich than Exposé, Desktop Stacks, native notifications come to mind. There's been a lot of practical security improvements too, with the permissions system and FileVault full disk encryption. By nearly all accounts APFS is a much better file system than HFS.

There's a lot to be said for Snow Leopard's simplicity and refined design, and plenty to complain about in Big Sur. But there have certainly been some improvements over the past 10 years. Even for grey beards, I'd say.

Maybe it was just me, but there was a lot of talk and excitement that the desktop metaphor and WIMP had kind of plateaued and something new might happen. There were a lot of interesting things tried, but the new UIs for smartphones were the only things that caught on. The desktop kind of stopped changing.
Magic Mouse 2 is where the real improvement is. It's a joy to use, even though it's sharp edges really suck for prolonged use. Hopefully they fix that in the next iteration, also it's a bit too heavy.
Amen. I bought my iMac with Leopard, wanting to believe in that it would be the "Apple Unix Workstation", and Snow Leopard was one of those rare things -- an upgrade, which was sold as a performance and reliability release, not a feature release, which was noticeably faster for me, and gave me great confidence in the whole platform.

It's been in steady decline ever since, with iPhone and iPad stealing the show. But now we have 1000 USD monitor stands, so there's that.

At the time it was a great UNIX workstation. Since then they've locked down so much that it no longer really is. But at least other DEs like KDE and Gnome are now usable.
Oh my god.

In later Mac OS versions, scroll bars are set by default to appear only based on mouse/trackpad movement, which is a pity; many users probably don’t realise they can have scroll bars appear permanently, so they don’t have to time the mouseover action for the scroll bar to appear and then hope they’ll manage to grab it when they want to quickly scroll down a long list of elements.

This... is me. For years I've been frustrated by recent versions of MacOS and the problem of the disappearing/impossible to grab scroll bar. And only by reading this article did I learn that you can make it stick around permanently.

I guess, good for Apple for making that possible? But, holy crap, way to not communicate the existence of that capability to even sophisticated users.

While some elements of new UI definitely require improvements to OS underpinnings (e.g. the idea of adding gradient blurs everywhere), the vast majority do not.

Why can’t we have OSes layered better so that the “core” can evolve but these “design”-of-the-week changes can remain compartmentalized and potentially ignored from one release to the next?

To a large extent, nothing ought to break if you simply allow users to choose from any of the “looks and feels” of the past few years while updating the lower-level OS to be the latest. It also means you could have different security policies, e.g. prefer to auto-update more at the lower layers and auto-update less or never at the GUI scale.

And, any “correct” application is somewhat layout-agnostic anyway: technically with various Accessibility settings you can already change the look and feel and behavior a lot, and apps will not work quite right if they don’t respect these settings. There is not much difference between those changes and any Apple “design” from one year to the next.

I enjoyed that -- Apple's UI shifts have been subtle (mercifully) but I still think that there was a real high water mark around 10.6 and later to 10.10 too. I haven't upgraded to BigSur.
I remember how on Snow Leopard opening the lid of my laptop instantly showed the password prompt. What are more recent versions doing that it takes two or three seconds to show a text box?
There has only been one UI change since Snow Leopard that I would consider to be an improvement, and that is the option to enable dark mode. Big Sur reminds me of Duplo Legos.
I still keep a machine running Snow Leopard, these days it's mostly relegated to playing old games that never got ported to Intel since it was the last OS that supported Rosetta.
I've been using Mavericks as my main OS since March. It's a tad newer than Snow Leopard, but not by much, and I've modified it to be even more Snow Leopard-like. As you might imagine, I've run into many software compatibility issues, and I need to be extra cautious about security. But on the whole, it's been a huge improvement.

The biggest difference is the contrast. Mavericks's UI uses a wide variety of lights and darks grays, which I find both easier on my eyes and more comfortable to use. In Mojave, application windows would blur together somewhat, becoming messy and hard to work with. I can't quite explain it, but Mavericks's higher contrast UI keeps the windows separated, so I'm able to track them with less brain power.

I can also use Applescript and Automator without being interrupted by incessant permission prompts. I can activate the Dashboard from anywhere, to check my calendar, notes, etc without breaking my flow. And day-to-day, I just encounter a lot less general glitchiness. Mail doesn't randomly make itself the frontmost window, and random Apple processes don't start suddenly consuming CPU.

I like it here. I have no plans to leave.

My first Mac was the 2010 MacBook that came with Snow Leopard. It had a 10 hour battery life, and a decent keyboard. I upgraded the RAM, and I replaced the optical drive with another hard drive, then installed OS X in a RAID1 configuration. These are things nobody could say about a MacBook sold today.
> Oh look, from here you can also add it to your Reading List. Why exactly can these actions be found under a ‘Share’ menu?

Most people think this is a “share” button, as that’s what they use to share content, but it’s really an “action” button: that’s what it’s called in the system. It’s a button that lets you perform actions, some of which may be “share using another service” but some may be “perform some arbitrary thing on this content”. It’s sort of a hamburger menu for things you can do.

I don't disagree with many of his points. Snow Leopard was built when Apple was firing on all cylinders. It was a very solid release where everyone was doing good to great work.

BUUUUT-

Big Sur, while not perfect, is damn good to me. The UI is more consistent, if not more friendly. Compared to say, Snapchat, (which seems to build functionality only to befuddle non teens so that they can hide their activity) Big Sur is downright amazing.

I dont think that we should stray from concise, clear, and discoverable UI/UX. But I also dont think we should stop at what we all think was the best and never change. Keep in mind that even 60, 70, 80 and 90 year old users who never could deal with computers in the past are able to work iPads and iPhones now. My mom is in her 70s and uses her iPhone 7 for all her computing needs. To me that means we can push users a bit to adapt to newer UI standards.

Again, Snow Leopard was great- no disputes here. Big Sur is not perfect. But its better in my experience than Catalina, Mojave, heck even going back to the Lion OSes. I was pretty much disappointed to downright irritated on the first releases of say 10.8 to 10.15. I really expected Big Sur to render half of my software unusable. Fortunately it wasnt even 5% of my software that had a problem.

Many reference this OS in the past tense, but there are few reasons not to still use it today. If you are not going online or are behind a NAT, if you only browse your own websites (and HN) it's a perfectly capable OS, as are many other amazing, capable OSes and other programs released in the past.

Example: For any serious writing, I boot up my Windows Me virtual machine and open up Word 97, which, in my not so humble opinion, is still light years ahead of anything else available to me today in terms of speed and UI polish. Plus, I'm just used to it and feel comfortable with it.

When I'm done writing an essay, I open up IE6 (or Netscape 4, or Opera 4) and paste it into my local blog instance. Or I can go straight to my public blog and post it there, since I don't care about doing it over plaintext HTTP.

I believe that retro-computing is about to skyrocket, driven not just by nostalgia and comfort, but also all the design anti-patterns in today's software applications and Web services.

(If you really care about HTTPS over the network, I'm sure there's a way to set up an SSL stripping proxy locally, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet. #lazyweb)

Snow Leopard was incredible. At this point apple needs 2 or 3 consecutive bug fix releases for each platform. Every time a new os comes out I now dread upgrading to it for fear of what will stop “just working”.
I'd really like another "Snow" release right about now. I generally don't mind Big Sur's look, feel and function too much, but there's still quite a few bugs and the overall UI responsiveness and visual smoothness often leaves a bit to be desired.

The M1 is great, but I think Apple has left some potential on the table. Given how they perform today with Big Sur, I'd really like to see what they could do given a macOS release focused (almost) entirely on stability and performance enhancement.

“The difference between the user interface of Disk Utility in Snow Leopard and Disk Utility in Big Sur can be summarised like this: one is functional, the other is pretty.”

Forget just Disk Utility, this is an apt metaphor for an OS comparison as a whole.

As much as Craig Federighi et al. say they still love the Mac, I wonder how true that is. Does anyone have any detailed/insider information on this transformation of Mac OS from “the power of Unix, but user friendly” to “iOS, but with a trackpad”?

While I enjoyed OSX SL a lot, I believe this update was the one that modified Exposé/Mission Control to use a neat grid for every window, instead of shrinking all of them and keeping their relative size. This hampered the feature greatly for me, and am very glad they reverted it.

Exposé/Mission control + hot corners are what keep me sane re: window management.

But I with Apple would slow their releases and spend a whole release fixing bugs, since I feel like they're getting out of hand.

I felt that there was a similar U-shaped curve for the classic Mac system as well. I started using Macs around the time of System 4 (when the System and the Finder had separate versioning schemes). For me, the peak of elegance and usability was reached at System 7. It was downhill after that (through OS 8 and 9).

Maybe there's a general principle at work. Systems always change with time, but after a certain point, change becomes less for improvement and more for its own sake.

Skeuomorphism >> Fisher Price
Hard to choose between Tiger and Snow Leopard as my favorite OS X release. Both were stellar.
I miss the welcome videos. 10.3 introduced me to Royksopp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uzNyiODsw
I miss the Snow Leopard 10.6 design dearly.

When I updated to 10.8 Mountain Lion, I gained Messages (iMessage desktop) and Notes, but I lost Web Sharing. Now I have to install Apache myself, and it often breaks when I update the OS.

I updated to 10.9 when I got a 2014 Retina 15" MBP. Then I lost the ability to sync Notes and Safari Bookmarks to my iPhone over USB (I don't use iCloud). iTunes 11 broke the browser view, so I still downgrade to iTunes 10.6.3 (even on Mac OS 10.13).

I updated to El Capitan 10.11 when I upgraded my SSD from 512GB to a 2TB SSPOLARIS. That's when the redesigned Finder really hit me, and I've never been comfortable with it. There's a lag when creating a new folder and typing the name, which often means I get "untitled folder" and start navigating to another folder. The redesign of iCal pushed me towards an old version of BusyCal, and I have to use a locally-hosted calendar server. I lost Calendar USB sync to my iPhone.

I needed High Sierra 10.13 when I upgraded my SSD again to a 4TB Sabrent Rocket, to use the NVME driver. It was quite some effort to avoid using APFS. I want to be able to mount my SSD over Target Disk Mode if/when things go wrong.

As far as I know, the latest versions of Music (no longer iTunes) don't even support syncing apps. I also heard some bad things about Time Machine.

The main reasons I like Mac + iPhone are:

Mac: MagSafe, AppleScript, Office

Both: iSync USB, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Music, Bookmarks, Photos, Wiki2Touch, Skype

iPhone: MyWi, Re-restore, Jailbreak, PHP/lighttpd

The things I lack on iPhone are: SD card reader, USB host with drivers (mount someone else's phone), Removable battery (but Third Rail case is good). No Android phone has tried to address these, and most have obscenely large screens (I like the 3.5" on my iPhone 4S).

I've had to use Windows 10 at work for the last month, but it's unpleasant. Put a folder in the Recycle Bin and want to recover one file? Nope, you have to restore the whole folder, copy out that file, and delete it again. Scrolling Excel on a Dell Precision 7550? The screen glitches out with black bars. Type accented characters like é? Only with charmap.exe, slowly. Safely remove USB? Multiple presses. I made a lot of AutoHotKey scripts, but it's a struggle. So I'm not changing to Windows any time soon, but I'm disappointed in the way Apple has gone, and wish that Linux might one day catch up to Snow Leopard levels of usability and design.

I’ve been waiting for a stability release of macOS for YEARS. A return to Snow Leopard.

Alas.

Ah, the good old times when Apple actually followed their own HIG.
Apple has really gone backwards in UI quality. It's so sad.
If I remember correctly wasn’t this the version which had to cool dance style intro music? I could reinstall for only that
Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X I recommended to anyone.