The next major version of macOS, presumably to be released in fall ’26 and numbered 27, thanks to Apple’s "crack naming team,” who are high on crack, is rumored to be “another Snow Leopard,” inspiring considerable hope and relief among Mac users. Perhaps the rumor is true, but I think the optimism is misplaced, because the historical reality of Snow Leopard was much different than the mythical status it subsequently achieved, as I argued a few years ago in my blog post The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard:
Snow Leopard was not a bug fix release. In fact, Snow Leopard was quite buggy, and Mac OS X 10.6.0 was certainly much buggier than Mac OS X 10.5.8, released a few weeks prior.
When you look back fondly at Snow Leopard, I suspect that you're not remembering version 10.6.0 but rather version 10.6.8 v1.1, which was released almost two years after 10.6.0.
It's an iron law of software development that major updates always introduce more bugs than they fix.
No major update will solve Apple's quality issues. Major updates are the cause of quality issues. The solution would be a long string of minor bug fix updates.
In addition to those crucial quotes, I’ll reproduce part of the Mac OS X timeline from that blog post:
| Version | Name | Release date | Months since previous .0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10.1.0 | Puma | September 25, 2001 | 6 |
| 10.2.0 | Jaguar | August 23, 2002 | 11 |
| 10.3.0 | Panther | October 24, 2003 | 14 |
| 10.4.0 | Tiger | April 29, 2005 | 18 |
| 10.5.0 | Leopard | October 26, 2007 | 30 (delayed due to iPhone) |
| 10.6.0 | Snow Leopard | August 28, 2009 | 22 |
| 10.7.0 | Lion | July 19, 2011 | 23 |
| 10.8.0 | Mountain Lion | July 25, 2012 | 12 |
| 10.9.0 | Mavericks | October 22, 2013 | 15 |
| 10.10.0 | Yosemite | October 16, 2014 | 12 |
Let’s analyze the amount of time it took Apple to produce 3 new major Mac releases. From Mac OS X 10.1.0 to 10.4.0 was 43 months, or 3.6 years, and from 10.7.0 to 10.10.0 was 39 months, or 3.25 years, roughly the same as before. In stark contrast, from 10.4.0 to 10.7.0 was 75 months, or 6.25 years, a massive difference, the amount of time almost doubled!
Note the parenthetical remark in the table entry for Leopard, “delayed due to iPhone.” This was explicitly admitted by Apple in a press release on April 12, 2007 (archived):
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.
Thus, it’s indisputable that iPhone had a significant effect on Leopard. Strangely, nobody appears to acknowledge that iPhone may have had a significant effect on Snow Leopard too. Apple (in)famously promoted Snow Leopard as having “0 New Features.” Although this was clearly a joking exaggeration, the joke had a grain of truth, reflecting the limited scope of Snow Leopard compared to its predecessors such as Leopard and Tiger. No joke was Snow Leopard’s price discount: $29 compared to $129 for Leopard or Tiger. Many people assume that Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on countless bug fixes, as if features vs. bug fixes were the only possible tradeoff. But Apple’s PR mentions a different tradeoff. What if Snow Leopard had 0 new features because Apple was working instead on iPhone—and iPad! After Apple released iPhone, the company did not simply rest on its laurels. It pushed ahead, not only on iPhone, which was becoming a huge hit, ultimately to overshadow the Mac, but also on a new product, iPad, released in April 2010. Does anyone believe that the key software engineering and QA resources “borrowed” from the Mac OS X team were all promptly returned, like a library book? I don’t believe it; I suspect that “stolen” would be the more accurate term. Due to iPhone, Leopard did not deliver on its promise. Snow Leopard did deliver, because it promised… literally nothing.
In October 2010, Apple held a Back to the Mac event preannouncing Mac OS X Lion.
Back to the Mac was a double entendre: on the one hand, it meant that Apple was bringing iPad features to the Mac, much to the consternation of myself and many other Mac users.
On the other hand, Back to the Mac was a subtle recognition that Apple was focusing on the Mac again after shortchanging it to focus on iPhone and iPad.
Apple admitted the effects of iPhone and iPad on both Leopard and Lion, so why will we not admit the effects of iPhone and iPad on Snow Leopard, the release between those two? Snow Leopard was not a bug fix release. On the contrary, I think it was primarily a placeholder, a way for Apple to show, while their focus was elsewhere, that the Mac was not entirely dead. To reiterate the point from my earlier blog post:
When people wistfully proclaim that they wish for the next major macOS version to be a "Snow Leopard update", they're wishing for the wrong thing.
I suspect that Apple’s focus may be an issue again, with the next major “27” updates. What Apple seems to care about most now is Apple Intelligence and fixing Siri, an embarrassment to Apple for several reasons: Siri sucks, Apple is seen by many critics as having fallen behind competitors, and Apple has not yet delivered on its public promises regarding Apple Intelligence. This may be considered by Apple to be another all hands on deck moment, betting on the future of the company, like the release of iPhone.
Sadly, I see no reason to believe that Apple has suddenly started to care again about software quality. The new year-based operating system numbering scheme is an overt sign and painful reminder to me that Apple has no intention to end the self-enforced yearly major OS update release schedule that is a primary cause of Apple’s software quality problems. What I liked about the Snow Leopard era, and what I think everyone liked about it, was the unusually long period after major releases when we received mostly minor bug fix releases, slowly improving the quality of the operating system, avoiding big disruptions. In that sense, we will never have another Snow Leopard, because the future is annual major updates.