I think anyone who has used snow leopard when it was current knows its was the best. I still don't think its been matched. So many 'features' have been added to the newer releases its just slowed the OS down. Snow Leopard is installed on my 2011 MacBook Pro and it boots in 8 seconds to the desktop.
I used Mac OS since Leopard and honestly I didn't see that much of a change to Snow Leopard to give it a S tier ranking, definitely a great system and deserving of a A tier tho
Yes, I definitely agree with Snow Leopard being the S tier “big cat” Mac OS X release. Leopard wasn’t too far behind though, and if it were me, I’d put the last “big cat” release Mountain Lion right in between an A and S because it’s integration of features to bridge the Mac and iOS was a springboard for everything to come after that in terms of how tightly knit the 2 are now.
I desperately wanted to try Snow Leopard on real Mac with the sleek first boot intro, especially curious about PowerPC Rosetta, but unfortunately my MacBook Pro just one year after 2011, it just won't boot, although now I've tried on VM, the experience is totally different.
Why exactly do people perceive snow leopard as being so amazing when most of its features were actually introduced with leopard? Is it because it was faster, or just a uniquely shared feeling of nostalgia for the era?
Leopard is where I came in. Snow Leopard was the best IMO. Apple needs to go back to introducing a new OS when its ready, instead of every year. The quality dropped notably when they started this and the bugs increased.
Everyone needs to go back to releasing products when there is a reason to release products, instead of just making up false novelty in order to keep up with the pace of competitive oneupsmanship
iOS has suffered similar problems where very annoying bugs were introduced in each major iOS version starting with iOS 13 that took several months to get fixed. iOS version 15 had a bug in Safari that caused all ungrouped tabs to be closed when an external app opened new ungrouped tabs and the total tab count exceeded a certain number (likely 500, because that was the tab limit in the version before tab groups were introduced in iOS Safari). It was only fixed in iOS 16, so I had to just deal with the bug for the major part of a year - not fun. Hopefully macOS isn't suffering such annoying bugs.
At the start of the video I thought, “Well obviously Snow Leopard is going to be the S-tier.” Glad I was right, but I agree with the community that Tiger is also an S. Both are fantastic operating systems.
Tiger was probably the best: runs on G3, G4, G5, or Intel (except for Classic on Intel); still has Classic mode (dropped in Leopard); most apps built up to 2010 run on it where 10.3 and earlier were dropped by devs fairly quickly and Leopard introduced problems for some older apps; lots of features but relatively lightweight compared to Leopard or later.
One thing I really wish Apple would do in modern versions of macOS is let us revisit the old themes. I _love_ the Aqua interface. Back when I was a poverty-stricken teen, those round blue buttons, colourful window controls, and pinstripe windows were an aspirational goal for me. I wanted a Mac so badly I used transformation packs on Windows XP to make it look the part, except far far jankier. Right now, I would like nothing more than to be able to switch macOS 12 to a Tiger theme.
Sorry Crazy Ken, but Tiger for Intel never had a retail release. Apple shipped machine specific versions of Tiger for Intel with an Intel machine. Leopard was the first retail version of OS X for Intel and PPC. I.e you couldn’t walk into an Apple Store or BestBuy and purchase a copy and then go home and put it in your Intel Mac. You had to use the disks that came with your machine.
I'm still using Tiger and Leopard in various systems (Intel and PowerPC) and I totally agree with your Tier list. Some things you didn't mention: Lion not only dropped Rosetta but also FrontRow, which was absolutely critical for me as I used a 2007 Mac Mini as an "Apple TV 1 on steroids". iSync as well for syncing with my Nokia cellphone. And it was the first Mac OS X that didn't greet you with a way too loud post install welcome melody - I really enjoyed these on my many Leopard installs. AND it needs much more system ressources as Snow Leopard. Over all I hated Lion back then (nowaydays I kinda like it. After all, it is the most futuristic and "path making" Mac OS). Next: I absolutely cannot stand jaguar and panther beeing the same tier, as except for Macs with a Rage 128, panther ran much smoother on the same hardware (notably the ATI eMac and >800 TiBooks). Next is Tiger: I love and hate this one equally. It can be rock stable (esp. 10.4 Server ist dope), has the fastest spotlight index of all cats, needs nearly no ressources, ergo is blazing fast, runs on nearly every new world ROM Mac, runs great on HDDs and has the best Dock appeareance (very futuristic, looking back now). BUT it has the worst SMB implementation of all times. Period. Hate it. Still S-Tier, love you Tiger
I saw the title of your video and knew instantly you'd go with the absolute best macOS cat release, Snow Leopard. Having used macOS from the 80's, and having been an Apple employee when Snow Leopard released it definitely has my vote for S Tier.
I loved Lion. I never had issues; like so many others did.. it's what got me in to OS X (macOS today). But I can see S-Tier going to Snow Leopard. So many loved it.. and was very stable.
My top would have to be Snow Leopard. It wasn't my first step into Mac OS X (that was Tiger), but it was my first step into hackintoshing. I had a Dell Mini 10v netbook, and with minor tweaks it ran Snow Leopard really well.
I used a 2006 black macbook as my daily computer for a while in 2018, and I had the snow leopard disk even though I think it could run up to lion natively but it did it's job so thats the version I am most connected to
Snow Leopard was a great OS - an absolute understatement marketing-wise, but so many innovations behind the scenes and also very stable, well-tested. Nowadays, Apple seems to focus more on marketing and somewhat neglect technical excellence...
Never been a mac user outside of the computers at school, but I have used Linux distros quite a bit after I would accidentally destroy the OEM Windows install. It's crazy how many UI features on Linux Mint/Ubuntu seem to have been Mac innovations. Not sure who got them first, but I'm going to assume Mac.
My first Mac OS was version 8.6. I lived the Mac OS X anticipation, disappointment (with Cheetah, which I didn't install and stuck with Mac OS 9) and then joy when Puma came out. I still remember installing Puma on my iMac G3. That first boot on Mac OS X felt like diving into the future.
Honestly, it was hard to give up Snow Leopard and go on to the next round of system updates, knowing it would all be continuing to change. Snow Leopard was pretty much perfect in its time.
I used OS X for the first time in October 2013 when I got my MacBook Air, it had Mountain Lion and I used it till 2020 before I updated it to Big Sur, but Mountain Lion is so nostalgic, it just feels like it was a different era before the Yosemite days
Mountain Lion was my first macOS experience as a kid when I got a MB Air from my dad, and it's very nostalgic to me, I was beyond amazed by everything on macOS
When it came to Mac OS X the versions that made a serious difference, um impact are 10.2, 10.4 and yes 10.6. Don't get me wrong 10.5 was a huge upgrade.. and even the last (outside of beta) Mac os version to run on PPC but it wasn't optimal on them systems unless you had really fast IO and lots of memory. Mac OS tiger would work well on almost any G4 Mac and had a very long life giving them Mac's an impressive advantage over the rest. But 10.6 I admit was a massive improvement under the lid and it too had a long life. In fact I bought a copy of 10.5 for my MDD, never installed it... and bought a new Mac pro with 10.6 and used that until 2014. There was litterally nothing in 10.7 that seemed worth upgrading to and still doesn't. Sure, ok so it looks and has a few evolutionary features but nothing stands out as a must have that 10.6 didn't have already and 10.6 looked more professional too. But 10.7 did start that Mac on this new course that it's on today.
Hehehe, I have literally been calling myself Snow Leopard in all my online presences ever since I used OS X Snow Leopard back then. The smooth and polished experience was that big a part of my life. Hello from Malaysia, great video, thanks Ken! 🙏🏻🙏🏻
Snow Leopard was my first experience with OS X. I had been a Mac user since System 7 when I first used Macs in 6th grade back in 1993. After X came out I swore off Macs because I hated the new OS. Switched to PCs until I got a mid 2010 15” MacBook Pro that came with Snow Leopard. Still have the machine today, running High Sierra, and it is still more than useable as a daily driver with a 1TB SSD and 8GB RAM.
My first time using Mac OS X was in middle school. On those white MacBooks and late iBook G4. Looking at the aqua interface, the dock with the abstract looking MS Office icons, with iMovie and the happy Finder icon. The icons jumping when I clicked on an app. Spinning beach balls. It was like another world coming from Windows XP on the matte black Dell desktops i was used to. It wasn’t intimidating or dull. It left a lasting impression on me. The default wallpaper was the “Aurora” with the 3D dock, so it was probably Leopard or Snow Leopard. It was cool. Admittedly me and some of the boys probably spent too much time messing around in Photo Booth’s warping effects.
My favourite version of Mac OS X was Snow Leopard too! Not because of the change log ( I didn't knew that at all, I was not a mac user back then) but because that was the version I have more iconic in my mind when thinking about the Mac of that golden era!
Haven't watched the video yet, but I'm going to say Snow Leopard. About 10 years ago I hackintosh'd a Pentium 4 machine with Snow Leopard, and it ran infinitely better than Windows ever did, and everything worked near-enough out the box. Nothing but good experiences I had with that.
The first OS X version I used was 10.3 Panther, but my iBook G3 came with a free promotional upgrade to Tiger when I bought it. I liked it, but Snow Leopard was definitely my favorite big cat version. It was so much smoother of an experience overall than Leopard... responsive, stable and full of little QoL improvements. There wasn't much to recommend OS X Lion or Mountain Lion over Snow Leopard, unless you had iDevices, I was a Windows beta tester back in the day and I'm still surprised at how simple and intuitive Snow Leopard is to use over the Windows releases that were out at the time.
Snow Leopard was the first Mac OS X I’ve used back in 2010, and I think it was the best starting ground for me as it was super stable and reliable. So I definitely agree with the ‘S’ tier!
I started my Mac Journey with Leopard and quickly updated to Snow leopard. Until now, SNOW LEOPARD Truely The BEST, CLEAN, FAST OS X ever, Running Big File Photoshop is like a riding magic carpet.Its smooth as butter. Its Finger Licking GOOD!!
Am I the only one which had bad memories about Mountain Lion? It was kinda slow and very unstable on my late 2009 iMac... Mavericks solve that for me. Also, I've never been a big fan of skeuomorphism as I prefer the look and feel of Windows 8 for example, so...
My mom did the opposite on her back than 2011 13 inch macbook pro, she had mountain lion and upgraded to mavericks, but she wasn't happy at all about mavericks, very unstable and a lot of apps would lock up and crash, so she begged me to put mountain lion back which i did, i used lion on my imac because i liked it, it was fast, responsive and fluid.
Same experience here with Lion, same Late 2009 iMac (important detail: with a Core 2 Duo E7600 and 4GB of RAM). I guess people were just richer than us and were all using brand new Mac Pros lol
My 2012 Macbook Pro, which I still use, and my 2008 Mac Pro that I retired last year. When MacOS 10.10 was released I tired to use it, but both systems slowed down very bad, and had some other problems. I downgraded both back down to 10.9, then when 10.11 released the next year I upgraded them to that and they both were fine. Am I the only person who had trouble with MacOS Yosemite?
9:55 There were actually a couple G4 models that were *officially able to dual boot Leopard and OS9. That means they can have the latest PPC version of OSX (although with a performance hit compared to Tiger and no programs to my knowledge that required it, at least none that worked on G4's) while also being able to run OS9 and 68k programs. *I know there are both ways to install Leopard on G4's that aren't supposed to be powerful enough to run it, as well as ways to put OS9 on later G4's that weren't supposed to run it, and that's not to mention third party emulators, but official support is always interesting.
Snow Leopard was very much S tier I agree with this whole video. I might get me a vintage Mac running 10.6.3 just because I miss that OS so much. It was just so stable I can't remember it ever crashing on me once for the 5 years straight I used it.
Congrats to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for being the best Big Cat macOS version of all time! (I voted for Tiger (10.4) in regards to compatibility with old and new Macs, but I do agree with others on Snow Leopard.)
Snow Leopard was my true entry into the Apple Ecosystem. I did play games on my Dad’s PPC macs so my first experience with Apple was technically OS 7 or 8 ;)
I've been a Mac user from Tiger to Catalina, all but the two first running on my Late 2009 iMac. From all that era, I only have really ever liked Snow Leopard. It was pretty much perfect in every sense. It was lightweight, consistent, productive and wildly unique. It even gave me my first baby steps in GUI development and OOP, since I didn't have an internet connection back then but Xcode came on the OS DVD! Honestly everything went downhill **hard** with Lion imho, performance was outright terrible and it stopped being much of an upgrade over my old Pentium 4 with XP, so I quickly ended up using Linux more than Mac OS. But at least Macs kept being fun for a while. Also, my second favorite Mac OS X is actually Jaguar. It's the purest essence of what OS X wanted to be at first: the most refined, Snow Leopard-esque release before Panther came along and started introducing brushed metal everywhere for no good reason other than Apple thinking it looked cool but then only going forward with it half way. It's an A for me. And Lion is more like an E.
10.8 Mountain Lion 😍 The. Best. OS X. Ever. Period. I remember the time when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion and boyyyy that OS was freaking AMAZING. It made the already perfect Snow Leopard and simply made it better. By the 10.8.5 update it was the most rock solid OS I’ve ever seen and worked with. Oh God the UI, I might be in the minority but damn those Skeuomorphic design looked fantastic 😍
I used to be an Apple Beta tester. I actually have an Apple Made Lion Alpha Build Disc. It's funny to me they never released a disc for retail. But it's cool to have such a rare item it seems. My first Mac was a 2006 MacBook C2D with Tiger. Tiger is my Favourite just because it was so far ahead of windows and was so beautiful to me, and just worked so much better for me. I remember the day I got my Leopard Disc it came on overnight shipping as I did the preorder for the release. I loved that box I ended up selling it "I dont remember why now" but I wish I hadn't. I would so love to have that box again might buy it on eBay when I have the spare money.
I remember my school computers getting Snow Leopard. It looked so cool and ran so much faster than Panther (which was the last version they had installed. We still had eMacs at that time). I still use the snow leopard background on my 2021 M1 Pro MBP and I love it every time I looked at it
5:40 "I was just kitten... KIDDING! I said KIDDING! I need to move on to Panther before I make another catastrophic pun. CAT-astrophi... *KENSORED*" This had me balling my eyes out with laughter. Great job Ken. Wait, was this part scripted or not?
The fact that Apple was even able to release a new OS was the reason why users were content with some features that were missing. I still remember our summer 2001 iMac that would crash regularly on startup in MacOS 9.1 due to Lexmark printer extensions. Although MacOS 9 was somewhat more stable than earlier versions, there were many times programs locked up on that iMac in MacOS 9. Locked up meant the entire computer froze and had to be restarted.
I believe the first version of Mac OS i used was either Lion or Mountain Lion (the school i went to in 2012 moved into a new building, and got new computers, the desktop computers they got were mac minis, which had windows 7 and mac os installed side by side, in most classes we used windows 7, but in the music class we sometimes used mac os, the mac minis in the music class had a music keyboard connected to them, as well as apple keyboards and mice, i am unsure which model mac mini these were, but i am guessing they were likely 2011 mac minis, as they did not have an internal optical drive (and I don’t think apple had released the 2012 mac mini at the point when they would have gotten them), but some of the mac minis did have external optical drives connected to them, i believe it was only the ones at the teachers desks that had an optical drive connected And from memory all of the mac minis had a USB extension cable connected to them, which i assume was there to allow USB flash drives to be connected I remember that at one point i had to show one of the teachers how to eject a DVD from the optical drive (from within windows, and I remember the teacher made a comment about what if the computer broke)
Although not a big cat, let’s not forget how efficient and refined Mac OS X Mavericks was! I’d say it’s an S-tier contender, hanging out with Tiger, Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion in my book. And the first free version!
Thanks for doing this. I don't touch apple for... reasons... and seeing what features each OS had is a nice knowledge. Makes me compare to what Windows and Linux have to compare it against.
I know it’s not a big cat release, but Mavericks was the single fastest version of MacOS I’ve used to date. It was rock solid stable and kept the beautiful UI and imo one of the best OSes of all time
Tiger is the clear winner. Leopard *did* run on PowerPC, but not with the same speed that Tiger had. Tiger has many of the modern features we take for granted today, but isn't bogged down with unnecessary features to make it "iOS-like." It also keeps the original aqua interface without too much tacky skeuomorphism. Clear S.
I still use an iteration of Snow Leopard on one of my drives. Yeah, I still drive older Macs. That one was basically bulletproof. And before they started bringing OS and iOS closer together.
Oh, I remember so well when macOS Lion was released, everyone hated it. TH-cam was full of rant videos about how bad the new inverted mouse scroll was. No one liked Launchpad and worst of all, the "Save As" feature was gone, instead documents were automatically saved and every time you launched TextEdit, all previously opened documents were restored. All of those features are still there today, and every time I reinstall macOS, those features are the first to be disabled. Man, I wish I could just reinstall macOS Snow Leopard and use it the way I did back in 2009. I hate how quickly app support becomes obsolete. I could reinstall Windows XP now and find software to make it usable like it was 15 years ago.
5:17 I find it neat the the "Blue Bubbles" phenomenon we see today just shows that, in a charming way, iMessage on iPhones, Macs, and iPads; under the hood, is still iChat. iChat never went away, it just became mobile and had a name change.
100% agree that Snow Leopard was the best of the big cat versions. I would even go so far as to say it was the best version of MacOS ever. I miss the classic grid layout of Spaces among so many other features Apple removed or ruined.
This was a great episode. And yeah! Tiger and Snow Leopard ftw! So Tiger axed some old G3 processors Leopard axed classic apps and G3 processors Snow Leopard axed PowerPC processors Lion axed Rosetta and 32 Bit Intel processors Mountain Lion axed 32 Bit EFI next version axing old Macs just for no clear reason but performance were Sierra and the following (altho Monterey runs perfectly fine on my 2008 MacBook Pro 17" HiRes) (one of the minor-updates of) Catalina axed 32 Bit Intel code execution
I love Snow Leopard, I have a external hard drive with Snow Leopard and boot up fast and used my old apps I have paid for back then. I was happy to find out it rank better then all the OS out there on your video! I still have my first iMac 2005? Maybe 2004, It only has Leopard and still works, one thing though, I will not go online because of hackers out there. Again, using the old apps on there and the Snow Leopard on my 2009 iMac, works great! The new OS is okay though! thanks for the video, made my day when I watch it!
Tiger absolutely deserved S tier, mainly for two things: speed and compatibility. You could run Tiger on a low end G3 system and still have a quick experience. Plus it's new enough to have a modern(ish) browser for it. 10.5 runs well on my DP1.8 G5, but it's nothing compared to 10.4.
Currently tiger is my favorite for ppc, seems to have the best support for gaming. Back in the day, snow leopard was my favorite update, however, jumping back to snow leopard from lion I find a lot of features that I’m used to, missing. Great video, I think you were spot on in the rankings. I used everything single version when they were new and remember those early adopter days when things like printing was difficult.
in hindsight visually Jaguar and Snow Leopard are both the end of an era in terms of the theme of the OS. After both of them big changes in the way the system looks. They should DEFINITELY release a full on Jaguar or Cheetah theme for a modern mac os system imo, that would be amazing. Snow leopard theme would be cool to see as well. It's been long enough, bring it back! Solid color fil be gone!
Great video! I agree with the S for Snow leopard. I think me personally would rank Panther higher than Tiger. Not because of features but because when Tiger came out you needed A LOT more RAM to make it usable. It was no where near as fast and efficient as Panther was. Until new hardware came out to take advantage of it, anyway.
Fun to know that there's a MacOS X "Puma" and a MacOS X "Mountain Lion". A mountain lion is also called "puma" depending on your location (for example here in Chile)... so yeah, they're the very same big cat.
Mac OSX wasn't really a rewritten version of the previous MacOS versions. It was, instead, an updated version of the OpenStep/NeXT OS that was given a new MacOS looking UI. Mac OSX 10.0 had none of the old OS and couldn't run any of the old OS's apps. It couldn't even manage something a elegant as Rosetta. Instead, it had to run a complete virtualized OS 9.2 to give the users access to their old applications. This was something that was very important at the time as there was only one third party commercial "shrinkwrap" application that shipped for 10.0, Macromedia FreeHand.
I don't even use a Mac until 2015 but I heard a lot of good thing about Snow Leopard. To me it's the quintessential version of Mac OS like Windows 7 did for Windows. Too bad I never got the chance to use it on a proper Snow Leopard era Mac.
Sometimes I really miss Aqua. It's the whole reason I'm a Mac user now. I was running 98SE and looking for a direction to go. Do I stick with Windows and upgrade to XP when it comes out, or do I switch to Linux? Then OS X was unveiled and I knew I had to switch. My fate was sealed. I loved that look back then I even mimicked it in Photoshop. It was all the rage for a while. It's completely gone now but back then it was the best look an OS could have. Especially when compared to XPs half-assed Fisher-Price looking gaudy blue and green Luna theme. (The Watercolor theme they used in the Whistler beta looked so much better than Luna but they threw that out the window.)
@@ComputerClan your so very welcome! I love snow leopard so much Ive even themed arch Linux to look and behave as much as possible to snow leopard. I plan to make a video about it myself on my channel!
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The video is cool)
Great video so interesting. Could you do one for microsoft windows
"Linode helped meowed ..." Missed almost a pun there Ken :D
I’m your 999th like 😃
There are other wild cats that they still could have used Mac OS Lynx would been cool
I think anyone who has used snow leopard when it was current knows its was the best. I still don't think its been matched.
So many 'features' have been added to the newer releases its just slowed the OS down. Snow Leopard is installed on my 2011 MacBook Pro and it boots in 8 seconds to the desktop.
Agree Hugh, Agree
8 seconds wow
I used Mac OS since Leopard and honestly I didn't see that much of a change to Snow Leopard to give it a S tier ranking, definitely a great system and deserving of a A tier tho
I ran a Snow Leopard hackintosh for a few years. It was, quite frankly, the best MacOS i ever used, and was my gateway into owning real Macs.
I keep thinking they’re going to do a new snow leopard. They should’ve done it a looooong time ago. It’s gotten very sloppy
Yes, I definitely agree with Snow Leopard being the S tier “big cat” Mac OS X release. Leopard wasn’t too far behind though, and if it were me, I’d put the last “big cat” release Mountain Lion right in between an A and S because it’s integration of features to bridge the Mac and iOS was a springboard for everything to come after that in terms of how tightly knit the 2 are now.
I desperately wanted to try Snow Leopard on real Mac with the sleek first boot intro, especially curious about PowerPC Rosetta, but unfortunately my MacBook Pro just one year after 2011, it just won't boot, although now I've tried on VM, the experience is totally different.
My mid 2007 MacBook runs Mac OS X Snow leopard
Why exactly do people perceive snow leopard as being so amazing when most of its features were actually introduced with leopard? Is it because it was faster, or just a uniquely shared feeling of nostalgia for the era?
Snow Leopard was the best because it’s so nostalgic and memories of it are always good for me ;)
Tiger is the best for PowerPC and Snow Leopard is the best for Intel
Leopard is where I came in. Snow Leopard was the best IMO. Apple needs to go back to introducing a new OS when its ready, instead of every year. The quality dropped notably when they started this and the bugs increased.
Couldn’t agree more
Yep
Everyone needs to go back to releasing products when there is a reason to release products, instead of just making up false novelty in order to keep up with the pace of competitive oneupsmanship
@@jek__ Exactly!
iOS has suffered similar problems where very annoying bugs were introduced in each major iOS version starting with iOS 13 that took several months to get fixed.
iOS version 15 had a bug in Safari that caused all ungrouped tabs to be closed when an external app opened new ungrouped tabs and the total tab count exceeded a certain number (likely 500, because that was the tab limit in the version before tab groups were introduced in iOS Safari). It was only fixed in iOS 16, so I had to just deal with the bug for the major part of a year - not fun. Hopefully macOS isn't suffering such annoying bugs.
At the start of the video I thought, “Well obviously Snow Leopard is going to be the S-tier.” Glad I was right, but I agree with the community that Tiger is also an S. Both are fantastic operating systems.
Snow Leopard is awesome but something about nostalgia gets me with Tiger so they both deserve that S tier
Leopard dock lagged like hell on my MacBook Pro Santa Rosa circa 2007. Tiger dock was 60fps smooth back then. I wondered why Apple would allow this.
They were way too obsessed with all the 3D and stuff. There was an easy terminal command to make it flat again though
Tiger was probably the best: runs on G3, G4, G5, or Intel (except for Classic on Intel); still has Classic mode (dropped in Leopard); most apps built up to 2010 run on it where 10.3 and earlier were dropped by devs fairly quickly and Leopard introduced problems for some older apps; lots of features but relatively lightweight compared to Leopard or later.
One thing I really wish Apple would do in modern versions of macOS is let us revisit the old themes. I _love_ the Aqua interface. Back when I was a poverty-stricken teen, those round blue buttons, colourful window controls, and pinstripe windows were an aspirational goal for me. I wanted a Mac so badly I used transformation packs on Windows XP to make it look the part, except far far jankier. Right now, I would like nothing more than to be able to switch macOS 12 to a Tiger theme.
Skeuomorphism is dead unfortunately.
Haha relatable! That was so me
@Sriram Sundar Damn shame too. Even the ugliest skewomorphism designs weren't boring, whereas now its just flat and tired colors.
Snow Leopard is still my favorite. I always have it installed it in a VM so I can use it every so often
Snow Leppard was the version we used in my Digital Media class and that was my introduction to Mac. I too give it an S.
Now let's rank Classic MacOS versions. System 7.6 is my favorite!
Yeah!! I would love that video
I like MacOS 9.
I like Mac OS 7,8,9/9.1/9.2
I like windows 3.1
The first version of Adobe Photoshop I used was 0.87. and it wasn't for sale.
That gives you an idea how long I've been using Mac computers.
Sorry Crazy Ken, but Tiger for Intel never had a retail release. Apple shipped machine specific versions of Tiger for Intel with an Intel machine. Leopard was the first retail version of OS X for Intel and PPC. I.e you couldn’t walk into an Apple Store or BestBuy and purchase a copy and then go home and put it in your Intel Mac. You had to use the disks that came with your machine.
Good to know!
I'm still using Tiger and Leopard in various systems (Intel and PowerPC) and I totally agree with your Tier list. Some things you didn't mention: Lion not only dropped Rosetta but also FrontRow, which was absolutely critical for me as I used a 2007 Mac Mini as an "Apple TV 1 on steroids". iSync as well for syncing with my Nokia cellphone. And it was the first Mac OS X that didn't greet you with a way too loud post install welcome melody - I really enjoyed these on my many Leopard installs. AND it needs much more system ressources as Snow Leopard. Over all I hated Lion back then (nowaydays I kinda like it. After all, it is the most futuristic and "path making" Mac OS).
Next: I absolutely cannot stand jaguar and panther beeing the same tier, as except for Macs with a Rage 128, panther ran much smoother on the same hardware (notably the ATI eMac and >800 TiBooks).
Next is Tiger: I love and hate this one equally. It can be rock stable (esp. 10.4 Server ist dope), has the fastest spotlight index of all cats, needs nearly no ressources, ergo is blazing fast, runs on nearly every new world ROM Mac, runs great on HDDs and has the best Dock appeareance (very futuristic, looking back now). BUT it has the worst SMB implementation of all times. Period. Hate it. Still S-Tier, love you Tiger
I saw the title of your video and knew instantly you'd go with the absolute best macOS cat release, Snow Leopard. Having used macOS from the 80's, and having been an Apple employee when Snow Leopard released it definitely has my vote for S Tier.
I loved Lion. I never had issues; like so many others did.. it's what got me in to OS X (macOS today).
But I can see S-Tier going to Snow Leopard. So many loved it.. and was very stable.
My top would have to be Snow Leopard. It wasn't my first step into Mac OS X (that was Tiger), but it was my first step into hackintoshing. I had a Dell Mini 10v netbook, and with minor tweaks it ran Snow Leopard really well.
I used a 2006 black macbook as my daily computer for a while in 2018, and I had the snow leopard disk even though I think it could run up to lion natively
but it did it's job so thats the version I am most connected to
Snow Leopard was a great OS - an absolute understatement marketing-wise, but so many innovations behind the scenes and also very stable, well-tested. Nowadays, Apple seems to focus more on marketing and somewhat neglect technical excellence...
I loved the video Ken, so much history behind OS X!!! Thank you very much for the shout-out, I enjoyed working with you. 👍
Never been a mac user outside of the computers at school, but I have used Linux distros quite a bit after I would accidentally destroy the OEM Windows install. It's crazy how many UI features on Linux Mint/Ubuntu seem to have been Mac innovations. Not sure who got them first, but I'm going to assume Mac.
My first Mac OS was version 8.6. I lived the Mac OS X anticipation, disappointment (with Cheetah, which I didn't install and stuck with Mac OS 9) and then joy when Puma came out. I still remember installing Puma on my iMac G3. That first boot on Mac OS X felt like diving into the future.
Honestly, it was hard to give up Snow Leopard and go on to the next round of system updates, knowing it would all be continuing to change. Snow Leopard was pretty much perfect in its time.
I used OS X for the first time in October 2013 when I got my MacBook Air, it had Mountain Lion and I used it till 2020 before I updated it to Big Sur, but Mountain Lion is so nostalgic, it just feels like it was a different era before the Yosemite days
Mountain Lion was my first macOS experience as a kid when I got a MB Air from my dad, and it's very nostalgic to me, I was beyond amazed by everything on macOS
When it came to Mac OS X the versions that made a serious difference, um impact are 10.2, 10.4 and yes 10.6. Don't get me wrong 10.5 was a huge upgrade.. and even the last (outside of beta) Mac os version to run on PPC but it wasn't optimal on them systems unless you had really fast IO and lots of memory. Mac OS tiger would work well on almost any G4 Mac and had a very long life giving them Mac's an impressive advantage over the rest. But 10.6 I admit was a massive improvement under the lid and it too had a long life. In fact I bought a copy of 10.5 for my MDD, never installed it... and bought a new Mac pro with 10.6 and used that until 2014. There was litterally nothing in 10.7 that seemed worth upgrading to and still doesn't. Sure, ok so it looks and has a few evolutionary features but nothing stands out as a must have that 10.6 didn't have already and 10.6 looked more professional too. But 10.7 did start that Mac on this new course that it's on today.
Hehehe, I have literally been calling myself Snow Leopard in all my online presences ever since I used OS X Snow Leopard back then. The smooth and polished experience was that big a part of my life. Hello from Malaysia, great video, thanks Ken! 🙏🏻🙏🏻
I started with Jaguar on an iMac DV, ended up with Tiger on that Mac. Tiger really was great.
Snow Leopard 4ever! I'll keep that SL CD like a treasure!
Snow Leopard was my first experience with OS X. I had been a Mac user since System 7 when I first used Macs in 6th grade back in 1993. After X came out I swore off Macs because I hated the new OS. Switched to PCs until I got a mid 2010 15” MacBook Pro that came with Snow Leopard. Still have the machine today, running High Sierra, and it is still more than useable as a daily driver with a 1TB SSD and 8GB RAM.
My first time using Mac OS X was in middle school. On those white MacBooks and late iBook G4. Looking at the aqua interface, the dock with the abstract looking MS Office icons, with iMovie and the happy Finder icon. The icons jumping when I clicked on an app. Spinning beach balls. It was like another world coming from Windows XP on the matte black Dell desktops i was used to. It wasn’t intimidating or dull. It left a lasting impression on me. The default wallpaper was the “Aurora” with the 3D dock, so it was probably Leopard or Snow Leopard. It was cool. Admittedly me and some of the boys probably spent too much time messing around in Photo Booth’s warping effects.
My favourite version of Mac OS X was Snow Leopard too! Not because of the change log ( I didn't knew that at all, I was not a mac user back then) but because that was the version I have more iconic in my mind when thinking about the Mac of that golden era!
5:47
Before I make a *cat* astrophic pun
Cat-a-strophic
(1 KHz sine wave)
I just slapped Tiger on my PowerBook G4 and Snow Leopard on my second gen Mac mini. I love both of them!
Haven't watched the video yet, but I'm going to say Snow Leopard.
About 10 years ago I hackintosh'd a Pentium 4 machine with Snow Leopard, and it ran infinitely better than Windows ever did, and everything worked near-enough out the box. Nothing but good experiences I had with that.
I placed my bet on Snow Leopard being the best.
same
The first OS X version I used was 10.3 Panther, but my iBook G3 came with a free promotional upgrade to Tiger when I bought it. I liked it, but Snow Leopard was definitely my favorite big cat version. It was so much smoother of an experience overall than Leopard... responsive, stable and full of little QoL improvements. There wasn't much to recommend OS X Lion or Mountain Lion over Snow Leopard, unless you had iDevices,
I was a Windows beta tester back in the day and I'm still surprised at how simple and intuitive Snow Leopard is to use over the Windows releases that were out at the time.
Snow Leopard was the first Mac OS X I’ve used back in 2010, and I think it was the best starting ground for me as it was super stable and reliable. So I definitely agree with the ‘S’ tier!
I agree with both result lists, but the second one is more accurate :) 10.4 for PPC and 10.6 for Intel are the top releases 100%
I started my Mac Journey with Leopard and quickly updated to Snow leopard. Until now, SNOW LEOPARD Truely The BEST, CLEAN, FAST OS X ever, Running Big File Photoshop is like a riding magic carpet.Its smooth as butter. Its Finger Licking GOOD!!
Mac OS X Tiger is the best OS I played with I love it
I still have it on my dual PowerPC G4 from 2003 :)
I'm not even a "Mac" guy but this was an entertaining upload. Well done, sir
Am I the only one which had bad memories about Mountain Lion? It was kinda slow and very unstable on my late 2009 iMac...
Mavericks solve that for me.
Also, I've never been a big fan of skeuomorphism as I prefer the look and feel of Windows 8 for example, so...
My mom did the opposite on her back than 2011 13 inch macbook pro, she had mountain lion and upgraded to mavericks, but she wasn't happy at all about mavericks, very unstable and a lot of apps would lock up and crash, so she begged me to put mountain lion back which i did, i used lion on my imac because i liked it, it was fast, responsive and fluid.
Same experience here with Lion, same Late 2009 iMac (important detail: with a Core 2 Duo E7600 and 4GB of RAM). I guess people were just richer than us and were all using brand new Mac Pros lol
My 2012 Macbook Pro, which I still use, and my 2008 Mac Pro that I retired last year. When MacOS 10.10 was released I tired to use it, but both systems slowed down very bad, and had some other problems. I downgraded both back down to 10.9, then when 10.11 released the next year I upgraded them to that and they both were fine. Am I the only person who had trouble with MacOS Yosemite?
9:55 There were actually a couple G4 models that were *officially able to dual boot Leopard and OS9. That means they can have the latest PPC version of OSX (although with a performance hit compared to Tiger and no programs to my knowledge that required it, at least none that worked on G4's) while also being able to run OS9 and 68k programs.
*I know there are both ways to install Leopard on G4's that aren't supposed to be powerful enough to run it, as well as ways to put OS9 on later G4's that weren't supposed to run it, and that's not to mention third party emulators, but official support is always interesting.
Snow Leopard was very much S tier I agree with this whole video. I might get me a vintage Mac running 10.6.3 just because I miss that OS so much. It was just so stable I can't remember it ever crashing on me once for the 5 years straight I used it.
Snow Leopard because it seems the most compatible (It Boots on lots of Macs)
Congrats to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for being the best Big Cat macOS version of all time!
(I voted for Tiger (10.4) in regards to compatibility with old and new Macs, but I do agree with others on Snow Leopard.)
Snow Leopard, Lion, Tiger and Mavericks. Loved them!
Snow Leopard was my true entry into the Apple Ecosystem. I did play games on my Dad’s PPC macs so my first experience with Apple was technically OS 7 or 8 ;)
Snow Leopard is S for me as well, my first Mac OS on my first Mac, the 2009 21.5" iMac, still fond of that machine and OS
I think you were pretty spot on, but I have to agree with Tiger & Snow Leopard being S tier.
I've been a Mac user from Tiger to Catalina, all but the two first running on my Late 2009 iMac. From all that era, I only have really ever liked Snow Leopard. It was pretty much perfect in every sense. It was lightweight, consistent, productive and wildly unique. It even gave me my first baby steps in GUI development and OOP, since I didn't have an internet connection back then but Xcode came on the OS DVD! Honestly everything went downhill **hard** with Lion imho, performance was outright terrible and it stopped being much of an upgrade over my old Pentium 4 with XP, so I quickly ended up using Linux more than Mac OS. But at least Macs kept being fun for a while.
Also, my second favorite Mac OS X is actually Jaguar. It's the purest essence of what OS X wanted to be at first: the most refined, Snow Leopard-esque release before Panther came along and started introducing brushed metal everywhere for no good reason other than Apple thinking it looked cool but then only going forward with it half way. It's an A for me. And Lion is more like an E.
Much as you know, Snow Leopard is the best One.
10.8 Mountain Lion 😍
The. Best. OS X. Ever. Period.
I remember the time when I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion and boyyyy that OS was freaking AMAZING. It made the already perfect Snow Leopard and simply made it better. By the 10.8.5 update it was the most rock solid OS I’ve ever seen and worked with. Oh God the UI, I might be in the minority but damn those Skeuomorphic design looked fantastic 😍
I used to be an Apple Beta tester. I actually have an Apple Made Lion Alpha Build Disc. It's funny to me they never released a disc for retail. But it's cool to have such a rare item it seems. My first Mac was a 2006 MacBook C2D with Tiger. Tiger is my Favourite just because it was so far ahead of windows and was so beautiful to me, and just worked so much better for me. I remember the day I got my Leopard Disc it came on overnight shipping as I did the preorder for the release. I loved that box I ended up selling it "I dont remember why now" but I wish I hadn't. I would so love to have that box again might buy it on eBay when I have the spare money.
My name appears at 19:00
I remember my school computers getting Snow Leopard. It looked so cool and ran so much faster than Panther (which was the last version they had installed. We still had eMacs at that time). I still use the snow leopard background on my 2021 M1 Pro MBP and I love it every time I looked at it
Panther never had intel, was it tiger they were running
Your school could afford and trust their students with Macs?
I love Snow Leopard as well, it's the most stable in back then, and the server software was also the most powerful.
5:40 "I was just kitten... KIDDING! I said KIDDING! I need to move on to Panther before I make another catastrophic pun. CAT-astrophi... *KENSORED*" This had me balling my eyes out with laughter. Great job Ken. Wait, was this part scripted or not?
The fact that Apple was even able to release a new OS was the reason why users were content with some features that were missing. I still remember our summer 2001 iMac that would crash regularly on startup in MacOS 9.1 due to Lexmark printer extensions. Although MacOS 9 was somewhat more stable than earlier versions, there were many times programs locked up on that iMac in MacOS 9. Locked up meant the entire computer froze and had to be restarted.
I believe the first version of Mac OS i used was either Lion or Mountain Lion (the school i went to in 2012 moved into a new building, and got new computers, the desktop computers they got were mac minis, which had windows 7 and mac os installed side by side, in most classes we used windows 7, but in the music class we sometimes used mac os, the mac minis in the music class had a music keyboard connected to them, as well as apple keyboards and mice, i am unsure which model mac mini these were, but i am guessing they were likely 2011 mac minis, as they did not have an internal optical drive (and I don’t think apple had released the 2012 mac mini at the point when they would have gotten them), but some of the mac minis did have external optical drives connected to them, i believe it was only the ones at the teachers desks that had an optical drive connected
And from memory all of the mac minis had a USB extension cable connected to them, which i assume was there to allow USB flash drives to be connected
I remember that at one point i had to show one of the teachers how to eject a DVD from the optical drive (from within windows, and I remember the teacher made a comment about what if the computer broke)
Although not a big cat, let’s not forget how efficient and refined Mac OS X Mavericks was! I’d say it’s an S-tier contender, hanging out with Tiger, Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion in my book. And the first free version!
Thanks for doing this. I don't touch apple for... reasons... and seeing what features each OS had is a nice knowledge. Makes me compare to what Windows and Linux have to compare it against.
I know it’s not a big cat release, but Mavericks was the single fastest version of MacOS I’ve used to date. It was rock solid stable and kept the beautiful UI and imo one of the best OSes of all time
Mavericks was the best and stable MacOS for me.
Tiger is the clear winner. Leopard *did* run on PowerPC, but not with the same speed that Tiger had. Tiger has many of the modern features we take for granted today, but isn't bogged down with unnecessary features to make it "iOS-like." It also keeps the original aqua interface without too much tacky skeuomorphism. Clear S.
I still use an iteration of Snow Leopard on one of my drives. Yeah, I still drive older Macs. That one was basically bulletproof. And before they started bringing OS and iOS closer together.
Oh, I remember so well when macOS Lion was released, everyone hated it. TH-cam was full of rant videos about how bad the new inverted mouse scroll was. No one liked Launchpad and worst of all, the "Save As" feature was gone, instead documents were automatically saved and every time you launched TextEdit, all previously opened documents were restored. All of those features are still there today, and every time I reinstall macOS, those features are the first to be disabled. Man, I wish I could just reinstall macOS Snow Leopard and use it the way I did back in 2009. I hate how quickly app support becomes obsolete. I could reinstall Windows XP now and find software to make it usable like it was 15 years ago.
5:17 I find it neat the the "Blue Bubbles" phenomenon we see today just shows that, in a charming way, iMessage on iPhones, Macs, and iPads; under the hood, is still iChat. iChat never went away, it just became mobile and had a name change.
100% agree that Snow Leopard was the best of the big cat versions. I would even go so far as to say it was the best version of MacOS ever. I miss the classic grid layout of Spaces among so many other features Apple removed or ruined.
I agree with your assessment of Snow Leopard. We called it 'Snuipaard' in The Netherlands ;-)
This was a great episode. And yeah! Tiger and Snow Leopard ftw!
So Tiger axed some old G3 processors
Leopard axed classic apps and G3 processors
Snow Leopard axed PowerPC processors
Lion axed Rosetta and 32 Bit Intel processors
Mountain Lion axed 32 Bit EFI
next version axing old Macs just for no clear reason but performance were Sierra and the following (altho Monterey runs perfectly fine on my 2008 MacBook Pro 17" HiRes)
(one of the minor-updates of) Catalina axed 32 Bit Intel code execution
I love Snow Leopard, I have a external hard drive with Snow Leopard and boot up fast and used my old apps I have paid for back then. I was happy to find out it rank better then all the OS out there on your video! I still have my first iMac 2005? Maybe 2004, It only has Leopard and still works, one thing though, I will not go online because of hackers out there. Again, using the old apps on there and the Snow Leopard on my 2009 iMac, works great! The new OS is okay though! thanks for the video, made my day when I watch it!
Tiger absolutely deserved S tier, mainly for two things: speed and compatibility. You could run Tiger on a low end G3 system and still have a quick experience. Plus it's new enough to have a modern(ish) browser for it. 10.5 runs well on my DP1.8 G5, but it's nothing compared to 10.4.
Got me ready now to open up my 15-20 year old white plastic laptop (running mac osx tiger & snow lep)
Great days 😉 great video
Thank you : D
I'm still running Snow Leopard on a 2009 Mac Pro. making music with it everyday.
Here before 500 views. Leopard + Snow leopard will always hold a special place in my heart.
Currently tiger is my favorite for ppc, seems to have the best support for gaming. Back in the day, snow leopard was my favorite update, however, jumping back to snow leopard from lion I find a lot of features that I’m used to, missing. Great video, I think you were spot on in the rankings. I used everything single version when they were new and remember those early adopter days when things like printing was difficult.
in hindsight visually Jaguar and Snow Leopard are both the end of an era in terms of the theme of the OS. After both of them big changes in the way the system looks. They should DEFINITELY release a full on Jaguar or Cheetah theme for a modern mac os system imo, that would be amazing. Snow leopard theme would be cool to see as well. It's been long enough, bring it back! Solid color fil be gone!
Great video! I agree with the S for Snow leopard. I think me personally would rank Panther higher than Tiger. Not because of features but because when Tiger came out you needed A LOT more RAM to make it usable. It was no where near as fast and efficient as Panther was. Until new hardware came out to take advantage of it, anyway.
YES! I love Snow Leopard! I downgraded my 2009 13 inch MacBook Pro back to it recently!
Fun to know that there's a MacOS X "Puma" and a MacOS X "Mountain Lion".
A mountain lion is also called "puma" depending on your location (for example here in Chile)... so yeah, they're the very same big cat.
Haven't watched the video yet but I know this is gonna be epic!
I love all the nostalgia in this video
I appreciate you saying ‘Hella’ 👊🏽
Snow was the best :D
Snow Leopard. It's gotta be the best. But all of them looked way ahead of their times and can't be replaced
My Tier List of Mac os
S : All of it
Mac OSX wasn't really a rewritten version of the previous MacOS versions. It was, instead, an updated version of the OpenStep/NeXT OS that was given a new MacOS looking UI. Mac OSX 10.0 had none of the old OS and couldn't run any of the old OS's apps. It couldn't even manage something a elegant as Rosetta. Instead, it had to run a complete virtualized OS 9.2 to give the users access to their old applications. This was something that was very important at the time as there was only one third party commercial "shrinkwrap" application that shipped for 10.0, Macromedia FreeHand.
I don't even use a Mac until 2015 but I heard a lot of good thing about Snow Leopard. To me it's the quintessential version of Mac OS like Windows 7 did for Windows. Too bad I never got the chance to use it on a proper Snow Leopard era Mac.
Snow Leopard was visually my favorite version of OSX.
Sometimes I really miss Aqua. It's the whole reason I'm a Mac user now. I was running 98SE and looking for a direction to go. Do I stick with Windows and upgrade to XP when it comes out, or do I switch to Linux? Then OS X was unveiled and I knew I had to switch. My fate was sealed. I loved that look back then I even mimicked it in Photoshop. It was all the rage for a while. It's completely gone now but back then it was the best look an OS could have. Especially when compared to XPs half-assed Fisher-Price looking gaudy blue and green Luna theme. (The Watercolor theme they used in the Whistler beta looked so much better than Luna but they threw that out the window.)
Wow ken. This was an episode I THOROUGHLY enjoyed. You did an great job on this one!
Thank you : D
@@ComputerClan your so very welcome! I love snow leopard so much Ive even themed arch Linux to look and behave as much as possible to snow leopard. I plan to make a video about it myself on my channel!
On Snow Leopard when you add many apps to the dock, some of them may disappear.
This lasted until Mac OS 10.14.
My Top 3 Mac OS X Releases are:
- Tiger at 3rd Place
- Mountain Lion at 2nd Place
and...
- Snow Leopard at 1st Place!
mountain lion is snow leopard’s son
I got out my old 2006 iMac and watched this on Snow Leopard using the Nightly browser.