Snow Leopard (10.6) also lacks batch file rename, automatic file versioning, full screen app support, trackpad gestures, and autosave. IMO that last one is huge—I remember losing many hours of work in Snow Leopard as a high school student, because whenever I got into the "zone" of writing I'd stop remembering to hit ⌘S.

Lion (10.7) has all of these features—Apple added a lot in that release. And while Lion itself was a buggy mess, Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) are basically just Lion with stability fixes.

I do prefer Snow Leopard aesthetically for it's higher contrast UI, but 10.7–10.9 are still well ahead of modern macOS in that respect, and there are even some individual visual elements I prefer in those versions, such as the Dock.

Mavericks is my favorite release overall. Launchpad is stupid, and probably the first place where Apple really began to break OS X's internal consistency, but it can be hidden away easily enough. Yosemite (10.10) is where things got really bad.

(Just for fun: Mavericks > Snow Leopard > Mountain Lion > High Sierra > Sierra > El Capitan > Mojave > Lion > Yosemite > Catalina)

autosave is awful when mandatory, as it is in FCPX. when optional, like Office, it’s great.

Just picked up a 2008 MacBook with Snow Leopard (10.6).

I can confirm all (95%?) the features I've grown to love about macOS and regarded as innovative human design are still there.

Edit: I do however think iOS has been steadily improving, with some mild-moderate missteps. iOS 8 on my first 5s is a far cry from iOS 13.3 on the 11P. For comparison Snow Leopard was 2009, iOS 8 was 2014.

For me, Panther (10.3) was the last release where every new feature or addition was something I wanted. Spotlight and Dashboard in Tiger (10.4) were dog slow on my G3 back in the day and got disabled immediately.

But if you’d had a faster machine, would you still have disabled Spotlight?

I’d say Spotlight was a pretty big deal on the whole.

Gave my sister a Macbook Air to replace her crappy laptop.

First thing she couldn't figure out is where the "cut" functionality is.

I agree. 10.7 was when I left the Mac platform. Sometimes I miss os x 10.6 but I'm not a fan of anything past that.

I really love sidecar.