> 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 :(
Settings is not that bad. It's _awful_, yes, since it broke the panel design we had since the NeXT days, but for me the real annoyance is the way Apple progressively, inexorably broke desktop automation to a point where they now effectively painted themselves into a corner regarding having enough of a foundation to make Apple Intelligence useful (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/03/14/1830).
That said, I expect things to get worse as they manage to converge their multiple platforms in exactly the wrong way (by dumbing them down across the board even as people keep hoping they'll make iPad OS more useful, etc.).
But at least we still have Safari, Apple Silicon is pretty amazing and I can survive inside Terminal and vim. For now.
Mac OS X versions before Jaguar supported GPU accelerated applications, but the windows were composited in software which caused severe performance problems. Jaguar introduced something called Quartz Extreme, where the windows are treated as OpenGL surfaces and the window contents are textures mapped onto the surfaces. This made OS X significantly smoother on computers with a fast enough GPU and enough VRAM to support it, as the CPU didn't have to spend a bunch of time copying all the window contents to the framebuffer.
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 :(