Correction: 1:37 "Based off the FreeBSD Kernel" - This is only partially correct. As many of you have pointed out, OS X's kernel is based on a heavily modified version of the Mach Kernel with portions from the FreeBSD kernel, which formed the XNU kernel for NeXTSTEP.
That's correct as Jobs brought all the "know how" with the key devs with him when he returned back to Apple from Next company he founded and which played a crucial role in reviving Apple and getting it back to its feet to it is right now. Mac OS X was therefore a culmination and collaboration of both exNext and Apple devs.
The reason why Snow leopard is cool is it still had the aqua scroll bar. Graphical user interface rather than solid color fill user interface. It was vista way before vista, visually speaking. It's the end of that era which kicked off with beta OS X
Me too. In the beginning of 2020, a friend of mine (Roy) introduced me to a buddy of his and we went over to his place. Roy's buddy had a 2010 21.5" iMac face down in some junk. I asked about it and he said he didn't want it because it was broken and stripped of the HD. It was my first iMac. I took it apart, cleaned it, upgraded the i3 to an i5, replaced the missing Apple HD bracket, put in a brannd new WD Caviar Blue 500GB SSD. No RAM, so I put in 2x 4GB and 2x 2GB sticks for 12GB RAM.There in the DVD drive was the original Apple restore DVD. The Snow Leopard intro was the first one I ever seen, and this is the first 1080p screen I ever owned (other than my TV). WOW! Sadly Roy would pass away in 2022 from alcoholism. He was only in his early 60's.
People just liked Snow Leopard because it was the last OSX supporting Rosetta (1), so a lot of people refused to upgrade, just like those with PPCs refused to upgrade from Tiger due to its ability to still run an OS9 layer.
And how people like me refuse to upgrade from mojave because it‘s the last one to provide a 32-bit compatibility mode of sorts for older programs/games
Buy a Mac that will run the software that you want to use - if that software is still useful. They are easily available and not expensive compared to modern hardware. A Quicksilver (sub $200 on eBay) or Mirror Drive Door will run whatever OS9 or early OSX programs you want.
Mavs was pretty badass. It was so solid for audio production, that I didn't move from it for years. I still have my SL 10.6.3 retail disc back home. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Greg. That never gets old and you do a great job at presentation.
I STILL have a Mavericks partition ready when I need ProTools /Mbox. It was the first upgrade I made from Snow Leopard - and loved it. Then El Capitan, High Sierra and (forced and unhappy with it) Catalina.
The most surprising part of all this was that you aren't sitting on at least 100k subs, great video! I got my first MacBook in 2008 so the Snow Leopard release the following year always ties to happy memories of a new, stable and refreshing computing experience and leaving the then-hated Windows of the previous decade behind. I agree that Mavericks was the tops of that era, and it had perhaps the all-time best-matched system wallpaper, that wave perfectly conveyed the speed and power lurking beneath your fingertips.
TH-cam is a funny place, I can’t tell if I’m doing good or bad as I’ve seen people complain about only 50 subscribers after a year and others complaining about one video going viral getting a million views and all their other content like in the hundreds. In any case I appreciate it. Yeah snow leopard was pretty fantastic to be fair but I just was working full time as a ux dev when mavericks dropped and it made my life so easy as I had resolution independence on any display, not just my MacBook Pro.
I bought my polycarbonate macbook at the day it was released and even received free copy of it.Otherwise the license was like 30$ at the time.Very stable OS absolutely.
I do agree with this. Mavericks was the most stable system I used. Running daily Pro Tools and Traktor on a MBP 2008I had only one issue when my hard drive died.
I had to smile at the mention of Microsoft Vista. At work, we had to examine it as a potential OS and that is when I made the personal jump to Apple Macs. I grew up in the early days of DOS and when Windows was not on every computer. Of recent, I had made mention how there was a time when OSX, even with its foibles was a fun OS for home users. You covered some of those OSs here and that is appreciated.
Snow Leopard was the last release before Apple exited the server market. And this also ment slowly removing "unix" services/apps under the hood until "server" became an app. And then Apple started the "back to mac" thing to make a Mac look like an iphone, andded the idiotic semi transparent windows etc. So Apple embarked in glitz in the UI which made subsequent releases vfar less "computer". My teenage 2009 Xserve is still at Snow Leopard and it will be replaced by a Linux box because Apple is no longer in that market. I've been updating some of the open source components (web, mail , php, mysql).
Ha, I’m just a mid tier ux developer with a Louis Rossmann sized chip on his shoulder for right to repair. I’d last a day before Apple’s share holders revolted after declaring the App Store would lower its share to 10% and dedicate more resources to removing scam apps, switch iPhones to USBc, open up the h2 chipset to 3rd party licensing for earbuds, and announce a commitment to right to repair, modularity, and support to reduce ewaste.
Actually pretty sure this the more likely scenario: No name Ux developer / wannabe youtuber given $2.7 million by Apple, declares "I was wrong about their products". Professes the walled garden "keeps us safe" from hotel balcony in Marseille via FaceTime. He was last seen boarding a 105′ Mangusta Yacht with two 20 something females, a case of Chateau red wine, after exiting his BMW.
One day very soon I also believe private ownership is needed I will always say Apple in the first name in creativity and needs paired with the first name in high-fidelity
one aspect I didn‘t saw you metioning at all is the fact that SnowLeopard was a maintenance Update. No new features to the Enduser except Exchange Support. All other Changes were similar to those in Mavericks but not in termes of efficiency it was in term of performance and it was a really great experience…
I like Mac OS X snow leopard because it was the last OS X supporting Rosetta (1), and it also was the first version to introduce the Mac App Store since Mac OS X 10.6.6, a lot of people refused to update their computers and I also refused to upgrade just like those with PowerPCs refused to upgrade from tiger to leopard due to its ability to still run an OS 9 layer.
10.6 was a milestone release which I appreciated more once 10.7 came out. 10.6 was a pause on features to polish and streamline. I held many Macs back on 10.6, especially unattended/server or limited use Macs. One 10.6.3 Mac has been running audio 24/7 for 12 years with only a reboot to take it out and clean the dust out every year or two. I greatly admired the technical improvements with 10.9 and was excited for it, but, it was a nightmare for my case with audio. coreaudiod was hanging and going silent for users of my software. It required a kill command to bring it back and a relaunch of the affected apps using it. It was not fixed until 10.10! It was a very challenging time of uncertainty of whether I could have a reliable software product and stay in business. 10.10 was the first OS to give us AVFoundation support which I believe started on iOS. I was so glad to drop support for 10.9 and amazingly I can still support 10.10 - 13.0 (9 OS releases) with the same build. 10.14 was the next milestone to hold Mac back on, here again appreciated more with the release of 10.15. Other than that 10.9 experience difference, I agree, that's how we lived through it and see it now in retrospect.
I will upgrade no Mac capable of running it beyond 10.14 (Mojave), and keep it in HFS+ partitions regardless of drive type. Use Terminal commands to disable Notifications, ReportCrash, MRT, and Spotlight.
as a mac user since circa 2015 and an aspiring retro mac collector, you've perfectly put into words why i have a soft spot for legacy macOS. i bought an M1 mac mini almost two years ago now to replace my 2018 gaming PC (which has now broke) and its been incredibly reliable for me, only kernel panicking a few times, and nearly every time was on beta software. apple silicon is seriously impressive tech ESPECIALLY for the price, but the planned obsolescence is a HUGE concern for me.
Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks will always be the big 3 in my heart. They were the versions of Mac OS X I grew up with, and I loved them to bits. I still use my Mid 2009 Mackbook Air (The last one with the flush design before the 2nd gen re-design) with Mavericks. I just love the design of the hardware, and the software is just perfect. Pure platinum.
Snow Leopard came along just after I switched back to a Mac after using windows since 1997. I stopped using Macs in 1997 due to the horrific build quality of Macs at that time, and for a few years I found Win 98, Windows 2000 & Windows XP to be perfectly usable on good hardware. Switching back to Mac on an Intel Mac and then getting Snow Leopard ( which I bought as an upgrade) was infinitely better than Windows Vista which was terrible. I feel the Snow Leopard era was great, we had decent upgrades in hardware and software and it was an exciting time to be a Mac enthusiast. I should add I stared using Apple with an Apple // back in the 80s.
Yeah, the mid 90s were a rough time for Apple, our family had a PowerComputing PowerCenter (clone). Apple couldn't seem to get a proper OS update and Windows 2k then XP had preemptive multitasking and protected memory and early OS X was rough. There was a brief span even as a full time Mac user I'd argue Windows had the better experience.
There are two releases I'll forever hold near and dear to my heart: Snow Leopard and Mavericks. Used both in my late 2011 MBP (Post SL but works perfectly with 10.6.8 update). Now I use it with Arch Linux for obvious reasons.
I WAS JUST THINKING of old Mac OS versions this week, and the gift of the OLD WALLPAPERS was the best thing ever for waiting till the end of a video hahaha 💪
Much better than the usual annoying the usual sponsor segment or some doof asking for Patreon money. Although to be fair, I don’t have sponsors so not like I have really a concern :)
Nice video. My favourite OSes are still Tiger and Snow Leopard. I love using them both, so clean and efficient, a real joy. Sure, I miss Airdrop, but that's ok on old Macs anyway. I'd use Jaguar honestly for the aesthetic, but there just isn't enough app support, and it runs a little slow. Slight video correction: the Mac Pro 1,1 doesn't officially support Windows 10. None of the classic Mac Pros (2006-2012) officially support Win 10.
Apple doesn’t officially support it, but windows sure does. Just pop in a dvd and watch the installer go brrr…. That was my experience with the 2008 Mac Pro as well, also not bootcamp supported but windows worked fine.
I can agree with you I use to be so excited about new macOS releases and I haven’t been very excited for a long time. I also liked Mavericks a lot many memories from my experience with it
Not a popular opinion but 10.8 Mountain Lion was (and still kinda is) my favorite OS of all time. It was rock solid yet super beautiful with that frosty glass dock and premium textures. I know I'm the only one left on this planet who thinks Apple's skeuomorphic design was super beautiful. Mavericks was totally meh on my 2010 iMac, it was feeling totally half-baked which made me downgrade to Mountain Lion, twice. However, those structural advancements are respected.
Personal take: Skeuomorphism are like fins on a car, indicative of an era that's now past tensed. A lot of it was dated metaphors to communicate abstract ideas to analogs in the real world (file folders, cabinets for archives). It became a dirty word as we found superfluous design for the sake of design like Game Center using green felt to resemble a pool table or the address book using leather. However, we've certainly over corrected as I much preferred the old Safari icon and the different shapes, as they were (to me) aesthetically pleasing and easier to visually identify applications. There's merit in both sides..... this might just be a future video.
@@dmugits almost like we need a good balance or EVEN BETTER... Apple make Skeuomorphism aka Aqua an optional theme if you want it. Never understood why it needed to be one or the other.
Snow leopard was just the OS where they just had every aspect of the OS nailed and every subsequent release would add or change things that pissed me off while adding very little if anything that felt like a new "feature" and not just a dumb update to safari. Since then, they broke the green expand button, fucked with and finally trashed the skeuomorphism, changed the navigation paradigm. REMOVED many quality of life features, little nuances that made things harder working in finder. Stopped supporting openGL in favor of pushing Metal leaving a great deal of cross platform developers to jump ship because they made it way too friggin hard to port games or apps to which took all the way up to metal 3 which just barely released to even get close to DirectX in terms of viability and still lacks widespread adoption with native apple silicon support still only in beta for unreal engine, a game engine which has been around for over 15 years, and the only salve for mac owners was boot camp --an incredibly inventive and powerful feature which literally gave apple the market share they have which they have since stopped supporting. Fucked with 3rd party developers ability to easily create and implement kernel extensions or plugins, repeatedly fucked up peoples entire setups in final cut or logic pro releasing the highly controversial "X" overhauls which took years to tweak and make viable for pissed off professionals. And honestly the only thing i can really think of that felt like a revolutionary upgrade is something like sidecar. Snow leopard is just the last operating system where apple forgot the adage "don't fix what ain't broke".
My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009 with Leopard and Snow Leopard was super fast and light. 10.6 was super optimized and Core 2 duo was a great CPU. Even today with OCLP this Mac can run well enough MacOs Monterrey.
What made 10.6.8 beloved was it was the last version that had Rosetta. That was the reason that 1/3 of the user base was still on 10.6.8 when Sierra was released.
This was an outstanding video and, I really enjoyed watching it. For myself OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, is the best of the "cat" operating systems. Because like you stated, it came out at a time when Mac desktop systems were the "central hub" for Apple users. Now, the first, second, and last thing out of the mouth of Tim Cook, is always "and with your iPhone ... your air pods, your Apple watch, your iPad, your etc., etc., etc." the new "central hub" for Apple users is the iPhone. Which, is something that, I never plan to own. In 1996, I started using Apple computers and for all systems within my collection that can support it, I always install a copy of Snow Leopard. Also daily, I still enjoy using this vintage operating system with iLife '09. iWorks, '09, MS Office, and for watching and recording HD over the air movies and TV shows (smile...smile).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who HATED Yosemite. Up until that release every OSX release felt like an improvement. 10.10 ruined the UI with its ‘flat’ bullshit ported from iOS. It also introduced so many bugs and design issues. I’m a software developer and the 10.10 release broke all of our software with crashes and licensing issues. What a nightmare that month was. I also hate Apple’s ruthless drive to drop ‘legacy’ technology support like X11, PPC, 32bit, HFS/HFS+ and x86 emulation. They do this purely to force upgrades and drives sales.
I’m a web dev by trade and it mangled my internet connection speeds. Id often 10-15k a second down and I was in the middle of an annoying project for AT&T. Learned my lesson about updating mid project, a reboot would buy me time and I was able to do the mdnsresponder hack replacing DNSresponder which was a life saver. Also I had issues with certain apps needing updates with Yosemite too which tracks with what you just said. Pretty dead on the last point. Just really sucks for us end users.
@@dmug Apple yanked a bunch of SSL certificates from the keychain without notice. That caused us the biggest grief as it broke all of our licensing and payments overnight. All these Mac users upgraded and suddenly couldn’t log in. They also removed an interface font that had been standard since OSX 10.0. This caused our software to fall back to some default font that look awful. We had to hurriedly re-engineer a lot of products and services. We had to bundle with the app the certificates Apple had removed. There were also crashes with basic stuff like file dialogs so we had to hack in replacements. The whole thing was a fucking nightmare requiring lots of late nights and it cost the company a lot. We almost stopped developing for Mac after that.
@@kirishima638 oof I've never done Mac dev but have contributed on iOS apps using React Native (yeah yeah, I know web guy) and there's always something being changed that is infinite headaches. Apple requiring for Apple sign on was certainly an interesting as we worked on a healthcare app, and they supported another sign on service and originally Apple wanted the Apple sign on to be required. Took a back and forth to land on it wasn't required in our case. I don't envy full time Apple-anything developers. I imagine right now SwiftUI is a hot topic among your team, not looking so great from what I've heard.
You have so many valid points and hit the nail on the head so many times in this vid! As a fellow 7,1 Mac Pro owner I know you shiver over what the future holds for a 5k entry price tag machine. I bought mine only a month before they announced Apple Silicone. I'm worried about the minimum amount of support given for a device I spent so much money on. I justified it remembering the amount of money I spent on my 5,1 nine years earlier, remembering how much use my 5,1 saw in 9 years, understanding inflation, and realizing hardware of the base model is at a higher level than the entry model 5,1 was in 2010. When I bought it prior to the Apple Silicone announcement I expected to get 7 years support, and maybe 10 years unofficial support. Apple needs to tread lightly in this territory with the release of the 8,1 and Apple Silicone transition. It would not benefit Apple to burn Mac Pro users as we're the most loyal fan base. We were already treated badly during the 6,1 trash can era. Piss us off and they will forever burn their most technical and loyal users, this time likely for good! I will be extremely disappointed if I don't get my 7 years out of my 7,1 because they decided to drop support early out of convenience for them. What's the point of spending extra money buying a customizable, upgradeable Mac if you can't own it long enough to get upgrades in before they drop support?!? If they plan to drop support for the 7,1 early they should be transparent about it when the 8,1 comes out. A hefty trade in incentive for all 7,1 owners would go a long way towards the sting of a short changed cycle. BUT the 8,1 has to be worth transitioning to. A lack luster fenced in upgrade like the 6,1 would be a hard pill to swallow from another angle. (I skipped the 6,1 completely due to lack of PCI expansion and the fact my upgraded 5,1 could keep up with a 6,1) I struggle with how you make an upgradeable Pro level machine with system on a chip architecture outside of what's done with a Mac Studio. What make it a Mac Studio with a couple pci slots for a raid or capture card and call it a day? My eyes will be watching the fall announcement with great anticipation to this answer. I love your walled garden HOA analogy. I feel like in the last few years my walled house has gotten a smaller yard because it was taken to widen the street through imminent domain. If apple doesn't handle this transition well, I'll have to rethink what future purchases look like with apple if I choose them at all. From grand and long term to minimalistic and year to year. Another valid point you had was where I was when I jumped into Mac and where we are now as a possible jumping off point. I walked away from Mac and jumped to PC in 93. I bought a 486pc that was cheaper, and had better compatibility with the rest of the world. In 93 Macs were on the decline and files couldn't even be copied between Mac and PC via floppy in a world before everyone had the internet. Mac had Claris Works, PC had WordPerfect. I was fed up. In 06 I was fed up again with Vista and blue screens of death everytime I tried to do real work on my PC restarted. I found out there was more cross compabilty for how disks were read vs the 90s. Apple introduced the 5,1 iMac and it had boot camp! Suddenly i could share files with other people and use windows still, with the bonus of not needing rebuy all my PC software on Mac like I did when I went to PC! And Snow Leopard was an amazing alternative to Vista! I got an 08 white MacBook, then the Mac Pro and I've had dozens MacBooks sense. But now like you said Windows 10 and 11 have come a long way! Are they perfect? No but they're solid for the most part. But Windows is close enough these days for me to make a jump off with amazing horsepower for my dollar. And build quality of many PCs is vastly improved over 16 years ago! Look at Surface and Razer Blade! Just where does PC hardware land in the next 5 years with the release of Windows on ARM and the success of Mac ARM hardware? We're in a unique transitional point for technology right now. It's hard to know where to be but in the now. I just don't want to buy another 5-6k computer to only be burned by lack of support from the manufacturer.
It’s gonna really rough for us 7,1 owners not knowing the future of our machines. I can see a future where I have a Mac laptop for development and my work stuff and a PC for… content creation. I never really came from a pc background, my parents had a performa and later a Powercomputing clone, so I never experienced the 486 and pentium eras of PCs. I did have a Pentium M laptop in the mid 2000s during the dark ages for Mac laptops but that’s it. I don’t know how far I’ll ever swing to windows but I need to keep an open mind.
@@dmug my parents had a LC 520. After having some other Macs. That was our last one. We had a neighbor move in down the street that owned one of those PC clone building businesses that were all the rage at the time. I just started middle school and he was nice enough to let me build my computer myself with the oversight of one of his employees. In the late 90s I actually got a job working for him in high school building computers on weekends, but that was the trail end of the go to a store and have a computer built era. Right before graduation he had to let me go cause business was slow. He couldn't keep up with gateway 2000s eMachines and cheap Compaq machines back then. These cheap machines and his wife getting cancer unfortunately ruined him. I decided to go a different route from programming, or individual system building. I went with networking! Something I knew wasn't going away and made more sense to me. Once I got permission to drill a hole under the house and I put in that old 10 base T coax cable between mine and my parents computer, I was hooked! I couldn't believe how much faster filter transfers were than building floppies or burning CDs! Being a network engineer, I've connected tons of technology and devices to my networks. You get to work with it all! And these days I use my Mac pro for large scale network config testing, large scale traffic simulation and I do a lot of windows emulation. Or I'll emulate Linux to represent a server. Not the m1 Mac's strong suit. I love connecting a VM to one physical interface on the Mac Pro and then communicating with another VM running concurrently on my same Mac Pro on the other physical interface with all kinds of lab hardware in between. It's a great way to test connectivity when studying for certifications. The days of needing a desktop computer are numbered. My Synology NAS does most of my server functions now instead of the cheese grader, and in my post military life I'm trying to get into video editing as well. But heck a MacBook air can even accomplish this task these days. I already own a used Surface Book because I wanted a pen and touch screen and I grab it for most windows things these days. Docks have become much more friendly with Thunderbolt 3. And other than being hit and miss with emulation my 14in MacBook is a solid machine. I'm thinking unless the new 8,1 is SUPER appealing when the 7,1 dies, I might let the traditional tower machine go. I’m also hoarding my 16in Intel MacBook since it’s the last of a breed. I won’t have a second MacBook once it’s no longer supported. Ironically because of Apple’s inflexibility to integrate new technology into MacBooks but the creation of apple silicone technology I have more commuters at once than I ever have before up to this point. I just don't see the upgradeability and customizations that appeal to me with system on a chip design. If you can't upgrades you might as well just work off a laptop. This is most likely where I’ll go in the future baring something that wows or surprises me. 1 Mac laptop, 1 PC laptop and a Synology NAS to handle all my server functions.
Been using Mac for 13 years and I kind of agree with you. The days when we actually had to pay and download the OS. 🙂 The SL was also a great version with great new features. However I remember when the flat design was introduced I was blown away!
Kinda agree about the flat ui I debated removing the flat ui bit as that was more iOS 7 than macOS, but eventually I had to finish this video. Also, I’ve felt like I’d pay for macOS if it meant we got longer term support but can’t make that deal with the devil.
@@dmug "Also, I’ve felt like I’d pay for macOS if it meant we got longer term support but can’t make that deal with the devil." Absolutely. That would be my dream! Anyways, your videos are awesome! I also spend hours reading your website. You seriously invested time into that upgrade guide! Keep up the good job! 🍺🍺
My personal favourite Mac OS was also Mavericks. Had it installed on my HP Hackintosh until Big Sur. Currently running Big Sur on that Hackintosh. My favourite Windows Os is tied between XP and Windows 7. My favourite OS out of All is Arch Linux.
My first computer was an old white MacBook. I had it on Snow Leopard for the longest time and didn't upgrade but at some point I had to update to Lion for some iPod compatibility. That basically bricked it it became sooooo slow. Maybe one of the reasons why Snow Leopard is so revered is because lots of people used it as a child and have nostalgia for it. But I remember even back when I was younger ppl were always wishing Apple would release another maintanance update that just fixed bugs and made things faster. I think Snow Leopard was even advertised as having "no new features". (Only half way through the video maybe he's about to mention that)
It’s sad apple didn’t keep around longer as an optional download. I have it as VM for the rare occasion I need it but also a great point I forgot about.
os x mavericks was my favourite os x release as well! It always seemed so stable, great performance and battery, and the last of the skeuomorphic os design. I used it for years on my early 2013 13” mbp and didn’t want to upgrade to the new design & many bugs
I dont know why so many people love skeumorphism, it always looks tacky and dated compared to clean (and MUCH more user friendly) modern design, of course simplification can go too far but in the case of macOS flat ui is a huge improvement
@@jacob-sh8ec id argue that skeuomorphic designs are much more user friendly because they’re literally imitating real life equivalents, which everyone knows how to use. I think it’s also a big hit with enthusiasts because it has so much more personality and dimensions than the flat and boring minimalistic designs of modern uis. Like when people tear down old buildings with really intricate architecture and design and then put up a modern building that looks like every other modern design and feels/looks lifeless
@@lukey333 flat design is better for usability, you obviously dont look at the safari icon and think about how it looks like a compass so it must be for web navigation, you recognise the shape/colour, flat design is better for this because the icon is clearly defined and quickly recognisable. as far as character thats subjective, some people like skeumorphic design, some people think it looks dated and would prefer clean minimalist icons. same with architecture, personally I prefer modernist and minimalist architecture (which if done right has a lot more thought put into it than youd expect)
I came into macs with os x leopard. I was used to linux, but wanted photoshop. Snow leopard was an optimisation on leopard and ran well, but I went on the subsequent releases and didn't think twice about it until I met several users that clinged to snow leopard like windows users to windows 7. Never know when they moved on, though. I got two mac minis now. a 2012 with user upgradeable ram and disk, and a 2020 m1 with non upgradeable anything. they look almost identical beside the light placement and the ports on the back, both has 16gb of ram but the 2012 can be upgraded to 32. The m1 has a 2tb disk, the 2012 has 512gb but can be upgraded to 4tb if I want to spend twice of what it is worth on it. progress isn't always great.
Since 10.6 they destroyed the Ken Burns screensaver, Expose looks messy now, Spaces was not forced on you, Colour was removed from the sidebar just making things take longer to find, Wallsaver apps dont work anymore, cant hide menubar anymore, full screen apps dont expose anymore. There are literally 100's of downgrades since snow leopard.
Ha, I think this is the first time I’ve heard a complaint about the screen saver or spaces being forced. Ars Techica I think described the removal of color on the side bar as being struck “color vampire”. That one as a UX dev certainly tracks with me as color is an easy way to make fast visual cues. A monochromic palette may be more aesthetically pleasing and less clashing but lowers the UI legibility.
Why the hate on Windows Vista and 8? These (together with 2000) were the versions that improved the platform. Windows XP, 7 and 10 only defined their predecessors - the video downplays 10.11 - 10.14 exactly for that. Vista was very stable. One mistake it made, was to have a lot of resource intensive Services (like search indexer) active by default. Many people installed it on older hardware and ... surprise ... got a slow system. Most consumer PCs had slow hard disk drives and terrible GPUs, back then. Windows 8 also brought some great improvements, internally. But everyone was talking about the changed start menu. Today, every windows user pins their most used programs to the task bar (just like macOS users do) and rarely uses the start menu....
Really, I don't hate Vista but it certainly pushed a helluva lot of users to explore macOS. Vista had a rocky start but the later service packs brought it around. I used it on a media PC and it ran fine but there were some buggy drivers that vendors released for it and made my early experience not the greatest. Windows 8 on the otherhand was a swing and a miss. They really wanted one UI to rule them all, touch and click and point but never really succeeded at either. As a UX dev, Windows 8 is maddening.
Vista was fine for me too, but I dont doubt their woes. Windows XP and 7 were the best overall. I agree Windows 8 is overhated. It was basically a polished Windows 7, it just had the metro UI which i understand and im not a fan of, either. But Id take that over overbloated Windows 10 and onward, any day. I use Linux exclusively now, but I really wish both Apple and Microsoft did not go down the shitter in terms of care for the consumer.
i went to my locale goodwill & was bumming around. then i went over to the cd's to see what they have & i found a copy of snow leopard. i bought it right then & there
That wasn’t exactly just Apple, as the Unicode Emoji standards dictates that. Apple probably submitted a few but also so did MS, Google, Facebook, yahoo and anyone maintaining a emoji library. I can’t imagine that takes away much from development rather any quality dips are conscience choice by apple (like not delaying a launch) with the resources they have.
The fact that they shitcanned PPC support so soon is a big part of why I upgraded my personal 16” to an M1 Max even though my 8C intel chip was plenty fast for my personal coding projects. I’m betting by next year or maybe 2024, no more intel support. Got out of it only paying $500 to use the machine for a couple years and I can feel confident that I’ll get the newest MacOS through 2026 at least.
I am running Monterey on an Alienware Area 51m Laptop and with a desktop CPU and replaceable GPU. I like the ability to swap components, hence why i built this hackintosh than purchasing the M1
I used Snow Leopard from 2008 to 2020. No kidding, 2020. That's because I kept upgrading my Macbook white 2008 with more RAM and storage. I loved Snow Leopard because it was fast, reliable and extremely stable. I tried Lion, 10.7 (the latest OS supported by the Macbook) in 2010 for a few months, but it was buggy and much slower. I switched back to 10.6 and stack to it for the next 10 years.
@@dmug yes....I own several old Macs with Snow Leopard due to old software that work divinely on them even on a datat core 2 duo with more ram and ssd and when I go back to my MBP m1Max I don't feel a big difference in the use of the interface.... yet how much faster is an M1Max than a 2006 desktop computer?!
To me, Mojave is peak macOS. I only started using it with 10.12, so I never got the chance to experience Mavericks, SL, etc, and while 10.11-10.14 didn't bring any major changes, it was wholly improvement, which can't be said about the later OSes, stability really took a drop with Catalina, and I don't think it's still recovered. Big Sur was fine, Monterey was fine on x86, but brought issues on M1 (like disabling booting from external media, which was completely fine on Big Sur). Honestly, Ventura 13 is one of the worst releases in recent history, with the new System Settings app, policy changes that required Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox & friends to make their apps completely unusable & stability issues (which could probably be blamed with my switch to M1 (and all the USB/TB related stability issues that come with it), from a Hackintosh)
Mojave was the last OS I felt like Apple had before going nuts with security and bad reasons for dropping support. If I’m not mistaken for apple silicon you have to reduce the security settings for external media booting.
10.6 was the pinnacle. For programmers there are things improved in later versions but from user point of view it's only downhill from there. Yes, there was a slowdown of the downhill at 10.9 but UX stuff broken in the previous two remained. Oh, and G5 "quad" had no problems whatsoever playing 1080p. That's just nonsense or you had a completely different one than I had 😛
Even though it was 2.5 ghz and had 2 dual core cpus, I don't think a CPU from 2000/2001 could even handle something like 1080p. Most likely you just had a graphics card installed in it.
There was no integrated graphics in those machines. One had to have graphics card installed. But again, the "quad" (2005) had no problems handling 1080p at all, even with the lower specc'd graphics card (there were two options).
I was birthed into my Apple Era way back in the °I Switched° ad campaign with a dual G4 PowerMac and ;OS X 10.2.3 ‘Jaguar’. Coming from Windows and Linux I was absolutely amazed. Happy memories. I distinctly remember the excitement of 10.3 and 10.4. I can’t believe it’s almost twenty years ago now.
Vista was much like XP really took service packs to bring it around. I had a media pc that ran vista and it really seemed run problem free after Vista SP2 or something. From my perspective, I think the constant pestering for security and people jamming it on old hardware harmed its reputation. it was never able recover from that and followed up by Windows 7 which really was a solid OS and didn’t have significantly higher requirements like Vista did compared to XP.
@@dmug I only upgraded to 7 in 2011, and being a Vista user for 3 years, it was pretty underwhelming, in fact, the tweaked design language was even more basic and bland. Other than that it's still pretty great. Also, macOS Mavericks is probably the most inconsistent version design wise, like, it came out the same year as iOS 7 yet for some reason it doesn't look alike at all, only some apps got flattened and they look uglier than in Yosemite, yet their icons are still the same, and then the new apps like Maps and iBooks look like total jokes, especially their icons, all this clashed with the skeuomorphic design language of the rest of the OS, and it made transitioning feel not very seamless. Other than that it was probably the best version of macOS I've tried, never owned a Mac, but I've demoed it with my cousin's MacBook Air back in 2014, will never forget it. When I get that 2008 aluminum MacBook, I'm gonna be dual booting Snow Leopard and Mavericks, just because of how fantastic they are.
I also, still have my Snow Leopard CD. In addition, daily I still use OS X 10.6 on some of my Apple vintage desktop and laptop systems (smile...smile).
I hope that Linux support on Apple Arm chips continues to progress. It would allow people to run a modern os long after Apple officially discontinues support.
I kept Mac OS X Mavericks for a very long time. Until the end of 2018. Then I tried El Capitan for a while and then left Mac completely and switched to Linux. I still love to play with my grey G3 with Sonnet G4 and enjoy Mac OS 9 and Tiger. Now I occasionally use Macs on Hackintoshes when I need Adobe products, but only because it's still 10% better than Windows. For me, Apple ended when they started focusing on merging iOS and Mac OS X.
I started with Mac OS 9.2 which was incredible and I'm now on the latest Mac OS 12.6. With that said, I still believe Snow Leopard is/was the best at least for music/G4 computer to Mac Pro and though it wasn't the fastest, I would say it was the most stable. Now, you mentioned Maverick which was really fast and pretty stable. I upgraded late on this one so, I had to pay for it but, was well worth it for the Mac Pro 2009 tower. By the way, The Mac Pro 2009/2010 5.1 towers were thee best period as far as Mac hardware. Anyway, though Maverick really didn't highlight anything, and was a no thrills OS and best for the 5.1 tower, these new OS's and hardware are so powerful that it's crazy. Now, if we can get the stableness of SL or Mav in the next OS Ventura, I would be 100% happy! Great video!
Honestly, the stability of OS X since the transition to macOS naming has been rock solid to me. I can't remember the last time I had to use time machine to do a restore outside of a HDD dying (2015?). These days, the issues are compatibility related and the rough edges of Apple changing its UI, at least for me. Also, it helps that I'm running modern hardware too, M1 Max, M1 Pro (work provided) and a Mac Pro 2019 so my perception is from someone with serious hardware
I think 10.6 and 10.14 are the best Mac OS X versions, so both of them are installed on my MacBook Air. 10.14 is for compatibility with the modern applications (btw it is the last macOS with the minimum 2 gb of ram requirement). But when I want to last on battery as long as possible, I boot into 10.6, which is super optimised and extremely fast (it takes less then 5 seconds to fully boot to the desktop from the moment when power button is pressed!) 10.6 is on top because it reminds how good macOS can be: super fast, super energy-efficient, super stable and very beautiful! So it holds special place as the best Mac OS X version in my opinion. 2nd place is taken by 10.14, 3rd by 10.11.
remember my first expirence with apple was made with an core i7 920 hackintosh and i still have the snow leopard dvd laying arround. it was so much a difference between windows that i bought my first mac short after that.. 😌
I remember people reviewing Snow Leopard when it came out, they were pissed they had to pay anything for it because it felt like a Leopard Service Pack and Apple gave out previous versions of Mac OSX for free and I don't recall which one, I'm assuming Mac OS 10.1 or 10.2 because OSX had a rocky start.
Tiger was my first interaction with OSX on the fabulous Black Macbook. I loved the experience to install the OS and the secondary CD with additional software.
This is great! Exactly the kind of content that I love to see. Could you make a followup video where you rank every version of macOS (10.0 to 13)? I would watch that over and over
Thanks for the high praise, I have a video about Nvidia and Apple in the works that you’ll probably enjoy. Stick around for a month or two and it’ll drop.
It's quite interesting to see how much loved Snow Leopard is, it was the OS I entered the Apple Ecosystem with in early 2011, however I never had that many problems with Vista. I kind of stayed on High Sierra for the longest time.
First of all, excellent and thought provoking video. Personally, I don't think about the "best version of Mac OS, but rather, my "favorite" version. My favorites, from top to bottom, are. Leopard, Mac OS 9, Big Sur, High Sierra, and El Capitan. I appreciated your shout-out to Leopard as the first modern Mac OS. I have often said the same thing. I too used Panther as my first full time Mac OS. I was very happy with it, and saw no real reason to pay the $120 for Tiger. When Leopard came out, I definitely did. Time Machine, Spaces, and so much more, how could I pass it? I never used Mac OS 9 in it's heyday, but I gained an appreciation fo rit using Classic on Panther. I picked up an older machine that would run it natively, and I loved it. It was light, fast, and did what it did very, very well. In today's world it is very limited, but it can still run those old games really well, and I use it frequently for just that. Big Sur was a very solid release when Apple really needed one. It prepared the way for Apple Silicon Macs, and still ran very well on Intel machines. I loved the nature dynamic wallpaper, as well. I have upgraded to Monterey, since eventually, we all have to, but I do miss Big Sur. High Sierra was the version I most anticipated. It is the one that caused me to jump on the beta channel, to see where it was going. The actual changes were not all that obvious, but APFS was huge, and the tighter integration of the "Apple Ecosystem" was very important. El Cap is a very solid release. It is about as far back as you can go, run it today, and not feel like you are missing out on modern computing. Use an up to date browser and emsil client, and you really can use this OS today, very easily. Clearly, if you were to pick the "best OS on this list, it would have to be Big Sur. However, my "favorite" is Leopard. If, somehow, it could be made to function within the ecosystem, I would be very happy using it regularly.
Best and favorite I'd say I'm using interchangeably. as its entirely an OpEd about Apple's walled garden under guise as yet-another-right-to-repair-rant by me.
You mention that Windows preserves application compatibility through emulation but this isn’t true. There are compatibility layers you can use for misbehaving applications but many will work out of the box because the libraries are still there. Full tilt Space Cadet still works fine out of the box and it came out in 1995.
Oh he forgot to mention the lack of the boot chime with 2016 Macs with Sierra and it's return with Big Sur. And I'm sad to report that the infamous sosumi is gone as well!
They never let the 64 but g5 run 64 but snow leopard. It 64 bit promise was never realized. Apple even tried to say it could not run logic pro and final cut pro, even though it could. Now we are going to do it again with apple silicon.
One of the visiting speakers to my camera club, couldn’t run her Keynote presentation on the club’s MacBook Pro using OS X Yosemite. The only answer I could find was to upgrade to 12 Monterey.
wow! So interesting, thanks! My first own Mac was an iMac 2013 with OS X Mavericks, and it was so great! Then Yosemite was a disaster in term of stability but brought to the Mac very cool Continuity features I still use everyday. Then I was invited to Apple to participe in their invite-only Apple Seeding program to test macOS versions and have direct link with engineers: it was really cool! Even though El Capitan-Catalina updates weren't the most interesting ones, our group had power to send reports that resulted in things getting fixed or improved, as a result of a single bug report. Then Apple totally rewrote their internal tool to manage bugs, and they don't care about us anymore, AT ALL! Only widely reported issue are sometimes fixed, but we can see stability has decreased dramatically! And part of that is that Apple now relies on customers to do QA testing... but at the same time doesn't really give them any consideration (only issue that an AI determines are widely reported have chances to be seen by engineer... so even widely reported issue that are not classified as such by this broken AI are never seen by engineers... and individual report don't matter anymore...). Apple has gotten from the best company in the world to one of the worst (price increase, lack of stability, lack of reparability, lack of support for the latest macOS versions, ...)
Thank you! I like Tiger and Snow Leopard a lot, but I’ve been arguing that Mavericks was the best for a while now. I still have it running on an old MBP and it’s still (mostly) usable today.
Tiger was when OS X really felt like it was all grown up. I think my G5 shipped with it. I'd like to have spent more time on each OS and I really do like Snow Leopard too, just though that everyone argues for Apple to do a "maintenance" release instead of throwing random new features at the user, and that's exactly what Mavericks was.
@@dmug I didn't get into Macs until a few years back, but when I did a bunch of people decided to give me their old ones so I've got ones running Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mavericks, El Capitan, and Catalina. I like the look and feel of the first three the best, but stick primarily to Catalina to get stuff done. I think that's why I like Mavericks so much. It's like the best of both worlds with still working while having the older OS X look. Also, I appreciate your site. One of those old Macs was a Mac Pro 1,1 and your guides have been immensely helpful!
I had a 2009 MacBook Pro that was terribly hot, but it ran everything from SL, Mavericks to El Cap and even Mojave. Mavericks ran best on it, and skeuomorphism worked really well non even non-retina display. Second fastest is SL and Windows 10, last place is any flat design OSX. I have to say tho, snow leopard felt like Windows XP. No nonsense and responsive like no other, even though the applications are slower and battery life shorter, the cursor has lower latency.
I think everything before Yosemite was good, and everything after, especially that flat design, that's why I loved Snow Leopard so much for its amazing design. The flat is just garbage and I can't look at it. Mavericks was excellent middle ground where it looked somewhat flat, but still had the charm and character of OS X.
I had a brand new Core2Duo MBP running Leopard and the dev beta of Snow Leopard ran circles around it on the same hardware. My macOS of choice would be Mojave by the way.
I loved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 🐆! It had some bugs (especially one where it erases stuff from your hard drive). But once the point updates came through the OS was stout, fast, intuitive, & extremely stable. Also, it had all the features of Leopard 10.5 but refined them perfectly.
Was a Mac user since the 90s but no longer. Remember Apple computer dropped the computer from its name. They hate power users and I finally jumped ship at Big Sur. They just want to make disposable consumer electronics. Tired of being spied on. Linux is my main system running on my Mac Pro 5,1 and while it isn’t terrible it sucks. I miss those Snow lep days for sure. Mavericks was great too. Great video!
I’d say they really don’t care about a certain kind of power user as the latest MacBook Pros are pretty much the best laptop money can buy for many use cases. The ideal Apple professional has a work provided MacBook where the business seems the stability and low maintenance as a savings on IT and support. Freelancers, contractors and edge case users they’re much less interested in.
I appreciate your perspective and will not argue with the notion that Mavericks was a great release, but for Apple hardware of a certain vintage and spec, Snow Leopard delivers a subjective experience that I can’t get with any other release. Boot times-even on spinning rust-rival SSD boots of modern OSes. The number of running background services (out of the box) fits in a single window, no scrolling. The drain on resources doesn’t require the admitted innovation Mavericks brought to the table, because it was a significantly lighter OS to begin with. That’s not to say it’s feature superior, it’s not, and I agree that what we’re all saying is we want a more Mac-centric Apple, but I just wanted to offer my perspective as to why I have such a fondness for Snow Leopard all these later. Owning three machines Snow Leopard-based machines that all still function quite well, it’s just unbeatable for my specific use case. I will have to give Mavericks another test run on my SSD equipped machines. Thank you for your work!
Tiger and Snow Leopard were absolutely fantastic, I can't speak for Mavericks because I went directly from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, and after Yosemite, I was so sick of the ongoing direction of OS X that I switched to Windows. I still love my old Macs though.
So wise in info, not by inexperienced person, so unbiased, so wise, so clear, many infos that casual tech people and even geeks won't talk about Amazing effort and style
Let's not forget Tiger, released as an update to PPc Macs in 2005, was shipped with all early Intel Macs. I purchased the first MacPro 1.1 3.0Ghz in early October 2006. Then I updated it to Leopard and subsequently to Snow Leopard which I found great: stable, fast, all the apps installed on Tiger worked, even those left only for PowerPc. Only Maverik made me feel that thrill of stability and speed again. Even now that I still have 3 MP 2.1, 3.1 and 5.1 and work steadily on an M1Max, Maverik and Snow Leopard I find them wonderfully excellent. If you then upgrade the RAM to 8Gb and a nice SSD, then you'll fly with these machines. Apple forces its users to update simply by removing app support... for no real reason; see 32bit apps or OpenGL support, minimalist single color icons 🤬. It puts a lot of useless things into the current OS, while it would be sufficient to allow the use of old apps.
Before even watching the video I can confidently answer "yes" from a visual and stability perspective (although for the most part MacOS has always been stable for me). However, that doesn't mean I'm salty that things changed. Design trends changed and Apple's target is the mass demographic, not me. My god do I miss that 3D Dock though. The welcome video too. Bear in mind the first Mac that I ever owned and booted up was the 2010 model running Snow Leopard and it was the Leopard design that first attracted me to MacOS so there is definitely bias there.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
Correction:
1:37 "Based off the FreeBSD Kernel" - This is only partially correct. As many of you have pointed out, OS X's kernel is based on a heavily modified version of the Mach Kernel with portions from the FreeBSD kernel, which formed the XNU kernel for NeXTSTEP.
That's correct as Jobs brought all the "know how" with the key devs with him when he returned back to Apple from Next company he founded and which played a crucial role in reviving Apple and getting it back to its feet to it is right now. Mac OS X was therefore a culmination and collaboration of both exNext and Apple devs.
The reason why Snow leopard is cool is it still had the aqua scroll bar. Graphical user interface rather than solid color fill user interface. It was vista way before vista, visually speaking. It's the end of that era which kicked off with beta OS X
Snow leopard was the first version of osx I ever used. So it holds a special place in my heart as one of the best os’s ever made.
Same here. I still have the CDs. Maybe it’s time to fire up this baby again.
Me too. In the beginning of 2020, a friend of mine (Roy) introduced me to a buddy of his and we went over to his place. Roy's buddy had a 2010 21.5" iMac face down in some junk.
I asked about it and he said he didn't want it because it was broken and stripped of the HD. It was my first iMac. I took it apart, cleaned it, upgraded the i3 to an i5, replaced the missing Apple HD bracket, put in a brannd new WD Caviar Blue 500GB SSD. No RAM, so I put in 2x 4GB and 2x 2GB sticks for 12GB RAM.There in the DVD drive was the original Apple restore DVD.
The Snow Leopard intro was the first one I ever seen, and this is the first 1080p screen I ever owned (other than my TV).
WOW! Sadly Roy would pass away in 2022 from alcoholism. He was only in his early 60's.
And was the last OS to cost $29.
My first one was Tiger in 2005 on the last iBook model ever made 😊
People just liked Snow Leopard because it was the last OSX supporting Rosetta (1), so a lot of people refused to upgrade, just like those with PPCs refused to upgrade from Tiger due to its ability to still run an OS9 layer.
Yeah that’s come up in the comments and it’s a valid point, wish I’d mentioned that in the vid.
And how people like me refuse to upgrade from mojave because it‘s the last one to provide a 32-bit compatibility mode of sorts for older programs/games
I agree. Losing my Rosetta support lost some of my favorite software forever.
Buy a Mac that will run the software that you want to use - if that software is still useful. They are easily available and not expensive compared to modern hardware. A Quicksilver (sub $200 on eBay) or Mirror Drive Door will run whatever OS9 or early OSX programs you want.
The OS actually seemed more fun also, due to the intro video being removed in 10.7 and other stuff that made 10.7 seem more boring
putting snow leopard on my hackintosh at 12 years old was probably my biggest tech accomplishment at the time lol, loved that OS
Mavs was pretty badass. It was so solid for audio production, that I didn't move from it for years. I still have my SL 10.6.3 retail disc back home. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Greg. That never gets old and you do a great job at presentation.
That's pretty cool, I think I have only not-for-resale Snow Leopard.
Indeed. Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks were great releases.
Mavs were the last OS for many of the older Macs like the 2009 iMac my wife had
I STILL have a Mavericks partition ready when I need ProTools /Mbox. It was the first upgrade I made from Snow Leopard - and loved it. Then El Capitan, High Sierra and (forced and unhappy with it) Catalina.
The most surprising part of all this was that you aren't sitting on at least 100k subs, great video! I got my first MacBook in 2008 so the Snow Leopard release the following year always ties to happy memories of a new, stable and refreshing computing experience and leaving the then-hated Windows of the previous decade behind. I agree that Mavericks was the tops of that era, and it had perhaps the all-time best-matched system wallpaper, that wave perfectly conveyed the speed and power lurking beneath your fingertips.
TH-cam is a funny place, I can’t tell if I’m doing good or bad as I’ve seen people complain about only 50 subscribers after a year and others complaining about one video going viral getting a million views and all their other content like in the hundreds. In any case I appreciate it.
Yeah snow leopard was pretty fantastic to be fair but I just was working full time as a ux dev when mavericks dropped and it made my life so easy as I had resolution independence on any display, not just my MacBook Pro.
I bought my polycarbonate macbook at the day it was released and even received free copy of it.Otherwise the license was like 30$ at the time.Very stable OS absolutely.
You had to be there. Snow Leopard was everything done right. There will never be a more perfectly crafted Macintosh operating system.
Ha, but I was ;)
I do agree with this. Mavericks was the most stable system I used. Running daily Pro Tools and Traktor on a MBP 2008I had only one issue when my hard drive died.
I had to smile at the mention of Microsoft Vista. At work, we had to examine it as a potential OS and that is when I made the personal jump to Apple Macs. I grew up in the early days of DOS and when Windows was not on every computer. Of recent, I had made mention how there was a time when OSX, even with its foibles was a fun OS for home users. You covered some of those OSs here and that is appreciated.
Snow Leopard was the last release before Apple exited the server market. And this also ment slowly removing "unix" services/apps under the hood until "server" became an app. And then Apple started the "back to mac" thing to make a Mac look like an iphone, andded the idiotic semi transparent windows etc. So Apple embarked in glitz in the UI which made subsequent releases vfar less "computer".
My teenage 2009 Xserve is still at Snow Leopard and it will be replaced by a Linux box because Apple is no longer in that market. I've been updating some of the open source components (web, mail , php, mysql).
After Steve Jobs passing, the Mac community desperately needs you to be on Apple's payroll as Steve's successor! Amen!
Ha, I’m just a mid tier ux developer with a Louis Rossmann sized chip on his shoulder for right to repair.
I’d last a day before Apple’s share holders revolted after declaring the App Store would lower its share to 10% and dedicate more resources to removing scam apps, switch iPhones to USBc, open up the h2 chipset to 3rd party licensing for earbuds, and announce a commitment to right to repair, modularity, and support to reduce ewaste.
Actually pretty sure this the more likely scenario:
No name Ux developer / wannabe youtuber given $2.7 million by Apple, declares "I was wrong about their products". Professes the walled garden "keeps us safe" from hotel balcony in Marseille via FaceTime. He was last seen boarding a 105′ Mangusta Yacht with two 20 something females, a case of Chateau red wine, after exiting his BMW.
One day very soon I also believe private ownership is needed I will always say Apple in the first name in creativity and needs paired with the first name in high-fidelity
one aspect I didn‘t saw you metioning at all is the fact that SnowLeopard was a maintenance Update. No new features to the Enduser except Exchange Support.
All other Changes were similar to those in Mavericks but not in termes of efficiency it was in term of performance and it was a really great experience…
Excuse you. The OP left out a major, major end user feature: Window resizing from any corner or side of the window.
I like Mac OS X snow leopard because it was the last OS X supporting Rosetta (1), and it also was the first version to introduce the Mac App Store since Mac OS X 10.6.6, a lot of people refused to update their computers and I also refused to upgrade just like those with PowerPCs refused to upgrade from tiger to leopard due to its ability to still run an OS 9 layer.
10.6 was a milestone release which I appreciated more once 10.7 came out. 10.6 was a pause on features to polish and streamline. I held many Macs back on 10.6, especially unattended/server or limited use Macs. One 10.6.3 Mac has been running audio 24/7 for 12 years with only a reboot to take it out and clean the dust out every year or two.
I greatly admired the technical improvements with 10.9 and was excited for it, but, it was a nightmare for my case with audio. coreaudiod was hanging and going silent for users of my software. It required a kill command to bring it back and a relaunch of the affected apps using it. It was not fixed until 10.10! It was a very challenging time of uncertainty of whether I could have a reliable software product and stay in business. 10.10 was the first OS to give us AVFoundation support which I believe started on iOS. I was so glad to drop support for 10.9 and amazingly I can still support 10.10 - 13.0 (9 OS releases) with the same build.
10.14 was the next milestone to hold Mac back on, here again appreciated more with the release of 10.15.
Other than that 10.9 experience difference, I agree, that's how we lived through it and see it now in retrospect.
I will upgrade no Mac capable of running it beyond 10.14 (Mojave), and keep it in HFS+ partitions regardless of drive type. Use Terminal commands to disable Notifications, ReportCrash, MRT, and Spotlight.
Catalina dropping 32-bit support is a thing I can never forgive
For me mojave is the end boss
To be fair I can see windows doing it in another 15 years
@@smokeajeff I love the newer Mac hardware but I really want to run Mojave on my M2 Mac Mini.
same. i also hated that ios 11 dropped 32 bit app support
This is why I still haven't upgraded past Mojave yet!
as a mac user since circa 2015 and an aspiring retro mac collector, you've perfectly put into words why i have a soft spot for legacy macOS. i bought an M1 mac mini almost two years ago now to replace my 2018 gaming PC (which has now broke) and its been incredibly reliable for me, only kernel panicking a few times, and nearly every time was on beta software. apple silicon is seriously impressive tech ESPECIALLY for the price, but the planned obsolescence is a HUGE concern for me.
Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks will always be the big 3 in my heart. They were the versions of Mac OS X I grew up with, and I loved them to bits. I still use my Mid 2009 Mackbook Air (The last one with the flush design before the 2nd gen re-design) with Mavericks. I just love the design of the hardware, and the software is just perfect. Pure platinum.
Snow Leopard came along just after I switched back to a Mac after using windows since 1997. I stopped using Macs in 1997 due to the horrific build quality of Macs at that time, and for a few years I found Win 98, Windows 2000 & Windows XP to be perfectly usable on good hardware.
Switching back to Mac on an Intel Mac and then getting Snow Leopard ( which I bought as an upgrade) was infinitely better than Windows Vista which was terrible. I feel the Snow Leopard era was great, we had decent upgrades in hardware and software and it was an exciting time to be a Mac enthusiast. I should add I stared using Apple with an Apple // back in the 80s.
Yeah, the mid 90s were a rough time for Apple, our family had a PowerComputing PowerCenter (clone). Apple couldn't seem to get a proper OS update and Windows 2k then XP had preemptive multitasking and protected memory and early OS X was rough. There was a brief span even as a full time Mac user I'd argue Windows had the better experience.
The very first Mac I bought on my own had snow leopard installed from the factory. I LOVED it.
There are two releases I'll forever hold near and dear to my heart: Snow Leopard and Mavericks. Used both in my late 2011 MBP (Post SL but works perfectly with 10.6.8 update). Now I use it with Arch Linux for obvious reasons.
I WAS JUST THINKING of old Mac OS versions this week, and the gift of the OLD WALLPAPERS was the best thing ever for waiting till the end of a video hahaha 💪
Much better than the usual annoying the usual sponsor segment or some doof asking for Patreon money. Although to be fair, I don’t have sponsors so not like I have really a concern :)
Nice video. My favourite OSes are still Tiger and Snow Leopard. I love using them both, so clean and efficient, a real joy. Sure, I miss Airdrop, but that's ok on old Macs anyway. I'd use Jaguar honestly for the aesthetic, but there just isn't enough app support, and it runs a little slow.
Slight video correction: the Mac Pro 1,1 doesn't officially support Windows 10. None of the classic Mac Pros (2006-2012) officially support Win 10.
Apple doesn’t officially support it, but windows sure does. Just pop in a dvd and watch the installer go brrr…. That was my experience with the 2008 Mac Pro as well, also not bootcamp supported but windows worked fine.
Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion: a triad was the best
I can agree with you I use to be so excited about new macOS releases and I haven’t been very excited for a long time. I also liked Mavericks a lot many memories from my experience with it
Not a popular opinion but 10.8 Mountain Lion was (and still kinda is) my favorite OS of all time. It was rock solid yet super beautiful with that frosty glass dock and premium textures. I know I'm the only one left on this planet who thinks Apple's skeuomorphic design was super beautiful. Mavericks was totally meh on my 2010 iMac, it was feeling totally half-baked which made me downgrade to Mountain Lion, twice. However, those structural advancements are respected.
Personal take: Skeuomorphism are like fins on a car, indicative of an era that's now past tensed. A lot of it was dated metaphors to communicate abstract ideas to analogs in the real world (file folders, cabinets for archives). It became a dirty word as we found superfluous design for the sake of design like Game Center using green felt to resemble a pool table or the address book using leather.
However, we've certainly over corrected as I much preferred the old Safari icon and the different shapes, as they were (to me) aesthetically pleasing and easier to visually identify applications. There's merit in both sides..... this might just be a future video.
@@dmug Yeah it will be an awesome video! I'd be super happy to see some information regarding the colorful confusing mess of Google app icons.
@@dmugits almost like we need a good balance or EVEN BETTER... Apple make Skeuomorphism aka Aqua an optional theme if you want it. Never understood why it needed to be one or the other.
Snow leopard was just the OS where they just had every aspect of the OS nailed and every subsequent release would add or change things that pissed me off while adding very little if anything that felt like a new "feature" and not just a dumb update to safari. Since then, they broke the green expand button, fucked with and finally trashed the skeuomorphism, changed the navigation paradigm. REMOVED many quality of life features, little nuances that made things harder working in finder. Stopped supporting openGL in favor of pushing Metal leaving a great deal of cross platform developers to jump ship because they made it way too friggin hard to port games or apps to which took all the way up to metal 3 which just barely released to even get close to DirectX in terms of viability and still lacks widespread adoption with native apple silicon support still only in beta for unreal engine, a game engine which has been around for over 15 years, and the only salve for mac owners was boot camp --an incredibly inventive and powerful feature which literally gave apple the market share they have which they have since stopped supporting. Fucked with 3rd party developers ability to easily create and implement kernel extensions or plugins, repeatedly fucked up peoples entire setups in final cut or logic pro releasing the highly controversial "X" overhauls which took years to tweak and make viable for pissed off professionals. And honestly the only thing i can really think of that felt like a revolutionary upgrade is something like sidecar.
Snow leopard is just the last operating system where apple forgot the adage "don't fix what ain't broke".
My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009 with Leopard and Snow Leopard was super fast and light. 10.6 was super optimized and Core 2 duo was a great CPU. Even today with OCLP this Mac can run well enough MacOs Monterrey.
I've BEEEN saying this, Mavericks was amazing!
What made 10.6.8 beloved was it was the last version that had Rosetta.
That was the reason that 1/3 of the user base was still on 10.6.8 when Sierra was released.
Others have pointed that out and I wish I would have mentioned that.
This was an outstanding video and, I really enjoyed watching it. For myself OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, is the best of the "cat" operating systems. Because like you stated, it came out at a time when Mac desktop systems were the "central hub" for Apple users. Now, the first, second, and last thing out of the mouth of Tim Cook, is always "and with your iPhone ... your air pods, your Apple watch, your iPad, your etc., etc., etc." the new "central hub" for Apple users is the iPhone. Which, is something that, I never plan to own. In 1996, I started using Apple computers and for all systems within my collection that can support it, I always install a copy of Snow Leopard. Also daily, I still enjoy using this vintage operating system with iLife '09. iWorks, '09, MS Office, and for watching and recording HD over the air movies and TV shows (smile...smile).
I’m glad I’m not the only one who HATED Yosemite. Up until that release every OSX release felt like an improvement. 10.10 ruined the UI with its ‘flat’ bullshit ported from iOS. It also introduced so many bugs and design issues.
I’m a software developer and the 10.10 release broke all of our software with crashes and licensing issues. What a nightmare that month was.
I also hate Apple’s ruthless drive to drop ‘legacy’ technology support like X11, PPC, 32bit, HFS/HFS+ and x86 emulation.
They do this purely to force upgrades and drives sales.
I’m a web dev by trade and it mangled my internet connection speeds. Id often 10-15k a second down and I was in the middle of an annoying project for AT&T. Learned my lesson about updating mid project, a reboot would buy me time and I was able to do the mdnsresponder hack replacing DNSresponder which was a life saver.
Also I had issues with certain apps needing updates with Yosemite too which tracks with what you just said.
Pretty dead on the last point. Just really sucks for us end users.
@@dmug Apple yanked a bunch of SSL certificates from the keychain without notice. That caused us the biggest grief as it broke all of our licensing and payments overnight. All these Mac users upgraded and suddenly couldn’t log in.
They also removed an interface font that had been standard since OSX 10.0. This caused our software to fall back to some default font that look awful.
We had to hurriedly re-engineer a lot of products and services. We had to bundle with the app the certificates Apple had removed.
There were also crashes with basic stuff like file dialogs so we had to hack in replacements.
The whole thing was a fucking nightmare requiring lots of late nights and it cost the company a lot.
We almost stopped developing for Mac after that.
@@kirishima638 oof
I've never done Mac dev but have contributed on iOS apps using React Native (yeah yeah, I know web guy) and there's always something being changed that is infinite headaches.
Apple requiring for Apple sign on was certainly an interesting as we worked on a healthcare app, and they supported another sign on service and originally Apple wanted the Apple sign on to be required. Took a back and forth to land on it wasn't required in our case. I don't envy full time Apple-anything developers.
I imagine right now SwiftUI is a hot topic among your team, not looking so great from what I've heard.
@@dmug yep another team is transitioning to Swift. I’m not a fan.
You have so many valid points and hit the nail on the head so many times in this vid! As a fellow 7,1 Mac Pro owner I know you shiver over what the future holds for a 5k entry price tag machine.
I bought mine only a month before they announced Apple Silicone. I'm worried about the minimum amount of support given for a device I spent so much money on. I justified it remembering the amount of money I spent on my 5,1 nine years earlier, remembering how much use my 5,1 saw in 9 years, understanding inflation, and realizing hardware of the base model is at a higher level than the entry model 5,1 was in 2010. When I bought it prior to the Apple Silicone announcement I expected to get 7 years support, and maybe 10 years unofficial support.
Apple needs to tread lightly in this territory with the release of the 8,1 and Apple Silicone transition. It would not benefit Apple to burn Mac Pro users as we're the most loyal fan base. We were already treated badly during the 6,1 trash can era. Piss us off and they will forever burn their most technical and loyal users, this time likely for good!
I will be extremely disappointed if I don't get my 7 years out of my 7,1 because they decided to drop support early out of convenience for them. What's the point of spending extra money buying a customizable, upgradeable Mac if you can't own it long enough to get upgrades in before they drop support?!?
If they plan to drop support for the 7,1 early they should be transparent about it when the 8,1 comes out. A hefty trade in incentive for all 7,1 owners would go a long way towards the sting of a short changed cycle. BUT the 8,1 has to be worth transitioning to. A lack luster fenced in upgrade like the 6,1 would be a hard pill to swallow from another angle. (I skipped the 6,1 completely due to lack of PCI expansion and the fact my upgraded 5,1 could keep up with a 6,1) I struggle with how you make an upgradeable Pro level machine with system on a chip architecture outside of what's done with a Mac Studio. What make it a Mac Studio with a couple pci slots for a raid or capture card and call it a day? My eyes will be watching the fall announcement with great anticipation to this answer.
I love your walled garden HOA analogy. I feel like in the last few years my walled house has gotten a smaller yard because it was taken to widen the street through imminent domain. If apple doesn't handle this transition well, I'll have to rethink what future purchases look like with apple if I choose them at all. From grand and long term to minimalistic and year to year.
Another valid point you had was where I was when I jumped into Mac and where we are now as a possible jumping off point. I walked away from Mac and jumped to PC in 93. I bought a 486pc that was cheaper, and had better compatibility with the rest of the world. In 93 Macs were on the decline and files couldn't even be copied between Mac and PC via floppy in a world before everyone had the internet. Mac had Claris Works, PC had WordPerfect. I was fed up. In 06 I was fed up again with Vista and blue screens of death everytime I tried to do real work on my PC restarted. I found out there was more cross compabilty for how disks were read vs the 90s. Apple introduced the 5,1 iMac and it had boot camp! Suddenly i could share files with other people and use windows still, with the bonus of not needing rebuy all my PC software on Mac like I did when I went to PC! And Snow Leopard was an amazing alternative to Vista! I got an 08 white MacBook, then the Mac Pro and I've had dozens MacBooks sense. But now like you said Windows 10 and 11 have come a long way! Are they perfect? No but they're solid for the most part. But Windows is close enough these days for me to make a jump off with amazing horsepower for my dollar. And build quality of many PCs is vastly improved over 16 years ago! Look at Surface and Razer Blade!
Just where does PC hardware land in the next 5 years with the release of Windows on ARM and the success of Mac ARM hardware? We're in a unique transitional point for technology right now. It's hard to know where to be but in the now. I just don't want to buy another 5-6k computer to only be burned by lack of support from the manufacturer.
It’s gonna really rough for us 7,1 owners not knowing the future of our machines. I can see a future where I have a Mac laptop for development and my work stuff and a PC for… content creation.
I never really came from a pc background, my parents had a performa and later a Powercomputing clone, so I never experienced the 486 and pentium eras of PCs. I did have a Pentium M laptop in the mid 2000s during the dark ages for Mac laptops but that’s it. I don’t know how far I’ll ever swing to windows but I need to keep an open mind.
@@dmug my parents had a LC 520. After having some other Macs. That was our last one. We had a neighbor move in down the street that owned one of those PC clone building businesses that were all the rage at the time. I just started middle school and he was nice enough to let me build my computer myself with the oversight of one of his employees.
In the late 90s I actually got a job working for him in high school building computers on weekends, but that was the trail end of the go to a store and have a computer built era. Right before graduation he had to let me go cause business was slow. He couldn't keep up with gateway 2000s eMachines and cheap Compaq machines back then. These cheap machines and his wife getting cancer unfortunately ruined him.
I decided to go a different route from programming, or individual system building. I went with networking! Something I knew wasn't going away and made more sense to me. Once I got permission to drill a hole under the house and I put in that old 10 base T coax cable between mine and my parents computer, I was hooked! I couldn't believe how much faster filter transfers were than building floppies or burning CDs!
Being a network engineer, I've connected tons of technology and devices to my networks. You get to work with it all! And these days I use my Mac pro for large scale network config testing, large scale traffic simulation and I do a lot of windows emulation. Or I'll emulate Linux to represent a server. Not the m1 Mac's strong suit. I love connecting a VM to one physical interface on the Mac Pro and then communicating with another VM running concurrently on my same Mac Pro on the other physical interface with all kinds of lab hardware in between. It's a great way to test connectivity when studying for certifications.
The days of needing a desktop computer are numbered. My Synology NAS does most of my server functions now instead of the cheese grader, and in my post military life I'm trying to get into video editing as well. But heck a MacBook air can even accomplish this task these days. I already own a used Surface Book because I wanted a pen and touch screen and I grab it for most windows things these days. Docks have become much more friendly with Thunderbolt 3. And other than being hit and miss with emulation my 14in MacBook is a solid machine. I'm thinking unless the new 8,1 is SUPER appealing when the 7,1 dies, I might let the traditional tower machine go. I’m also hoarding my 16in Intel MacBook since it’s the last of a breed. I won’t have a second MacBook once it’s no longer supported. Ironically because of Apple’s inflexibility to integrate new technology into MacBooks but the creation of apple silicone technology I have more commuters at once than I ever have before up to this point. I just don't see the upgradeability and customizations that appeal to me with system on a chip design. If you can't upgrades you might as well just work off a laptop. This is most likely where I’ll go in the future baring something that wows or surprises me. 1 Mac laptop, 1 PC laptop and a Synology NAS to handle all my server functions.
Been using Mac for 13 years and I kind of agree with you. The days when we actually had to pay and download the OS. 🙂 The SL was also a great version with great new features. However I remember when the flat design was introduced I was blown away!
Kinda agree about the flat ui I debated removing the flat ui bit as that was more iOS 7 than macOS, but eventually I had to finish this video.
Also, I’ve felt like I’d pay for macOS if it meant we got longer term support but can’t make that deal with the devil.
@@dmug "Also, I’ve felt like I’d pay for macOS if it meant we got longer term support but can’t make that deal with the devil."
Absolutely. That would be my dream!
Anyways, your videos are awesome! I also spend hours reading your website. You seriously invested time into that upgrade guide!
Keep up the good job!
🍺🍺
My personal favourite Mac OS was also Mavericks. Had it installed on my HP Hackintosh until Big Sur. Currently running Big Sur on that Hackintosh.
My favourite Windows Os is tied between XP and Windows 7.
My favourite OS out of All is Arch Linux.
My first computer was an old white MacBook. I had it on Snow Leopard for the longest time and didn't upgrade but at some point I had to update to Lion for some iPod compatibility. That basically bricked it it became sooooo slow.
Maybe one of the reasons why Snow Leopard is so revered is because lots of people used it as a child and have nostalgia for it.
But I remember even back when I was younger ppl were always wishing Apple would release another maintanance update that just fixed bugs and made things faster. I think Snow Leopard was even advertised as having "no new features".
(Only half way through the video maybe he's about to mention that)
Snow Leopard is the most recent Mac OS that is able to run PPC apps (via Rosetta). I have it on an old 2009 MBP just for that feature.
It’s sad apple didn’t keep around longer as an optional download. I have it as VM for the rare occasion I need it but also a great point I forgot about.
@@dmug Rosetta can be installed from the SL installation disk
I have Snow Leopard on my 2011 MBP and I play Tomb Raider for PPC on it :)
os x mavericks was my favourite os x release as well! It always seemed so stable, great performance and battery, and the last of the skeuomorphic os design. I used it for years on my early 2013 13” mbp and didn’t want to upgrade to the new design & many bugs
I dont know why so many people love skeumorphism, it always looks tacky and dated compared to clean (and MUCH more user friendly) modern design, of course simplification can go too far but in the case of macOS flat ui is a huge improvement
@@jacob-sh8ec id argue that skeuomorphic designs are much more user friendly because they’re literally imitating real life equivalents, which everyone knows how to use. I think it’s also a big hit with enthusiasts because it has so much more personality and dimensions than the flat and boring minimalistic designs of modern uis. Like when people tear down old buildings with really intricate architecture and design and then put up a modern building that looks like every other modern design and feels/looks lifeless
@@lukey333 flat design is better for usability, you obviously dont look at the safari icon and think about how it looks like a compass so it must be for web navigation, you recognise the shape/colour, flat design is better for this because the icon is clearly defined and quickly recognisable. as far as character thats subjective, some people like skeumorphic design, some people think it looks dated and would prefer clean minimalist icons. same with architecture, personally I prefer modernist and minimalist architecture (which if done right has a lot more thought put into it than youd expect)
@@jacob-sh8ecskeuomorph design is superior. Cope.
I came into macs with os x leopard. I was used to linux, but wanted photoshop. Snow leopard was an optimisation on leopard and ran well, but I went on the subsequent releases and didn't think twice about it until I met several users that clinged to snow leopard like windows users to windows 7. Never know when they moved on, though.
I got two mac minis now. a 2012 with user upgradeable ram and disk, and a 2020 m1 with non upgradeable anything. they look almost identical beside the light placement and the ports on the back, both has 16gb of ram but the 2012 can be upgraded to 32. The m1 has a 2tb disk, the 2012 has 512gb but can be upgraded to 4tb if I want to spend twice of what it is worth on it. progress isn't always great.
Since 10.6 they destroyed the Ken Burns screensaver, Expose looks messy now, Spaces was not forced on you, Colour was removed from the sidebar just making things take longer to find, Wallsaver apps dont work anymore, cant hide menubar anymore, full screen apps dont expose anymore. There are literally 100's of downgrades since snow leopard.
Ha, I think this is the first time I’ve heard a complaint about the screen saver or spaces being forced.
Ars Techica I think described the removal of color on the side bar as being struck “color vampire”. That one as a UX dev certainly tracks with me as color is an easy way to make fast visual cues. A monochromic palette may be more aesthetically pleasing and less clashing but lowers the UI legibility.
Why the hate on Windows Vista and 8?
These (together with 2000) were the versions that improved the platform.
Windows XP, 7 and 10 only defined their predecessors - the video downplays 10.11 - 10.14 exactly for that.
Vista was very stable.
One mistake it made, was to have a lot of resource intensive Services (like search indexer) active by default.
Many people installed it on older hardware and ... surprise ... got a slow system.
Most consumer PCs had slow hard disk drives and terrible GPUs, back then.
Windows 8 also brought some great improvements, internally.
But everyone was talking about the changed start menu.
Today, every windows user pins their most used programs to the task bar (just like macOS users do) and rarely uses the start menu....
Really, I don't hate Vista but it certainly pushed a helluva lot of users to explore macOS.
Vista had a rocky start but the later service packs brought it around. I used it on a media PC and it ran fine but there were some buggy drivers that vendors released for it and made my early experience not the greatest. Windows 8 on the otherhand was a swing and a miss. They really wanted one UI to rule them all, touch and click and point but never really succeeded at either. As a UX dev, Windows 8 is maddening.
Vista was fine for me too, but I dont doubt their woes. Windows XP and 7 were the best overall.
I agree Windows 8 is overhated. It was basically a polished Windows 7, it just had the metro UI which i understand and im not a fan of, either. But Id take that over overbloated Windows 10 and onward, any day. I use Linux exclusively now, but I really wish both Apple and Microsoft did not go down the shitter in terms of care for the consumer.
i went to my locale goodwill & was bumming around. then i went over to the cd's to see what they have & i found a copy of snow leopard. i bought it right then & there
After making this vid, I bought a boxed copy for $10 on ebay but the shipping was another $10, I'm sure you got the better deal .
Let me use it! I don't want to have to spend 100$ ill buy it off you if you want I just really need an OS i can use to start my business.
I never owned a Mac, but I did have a Hackintosh, and it was Mavericks.
Was a fun time
Finally, someone who actually rates Mavericks!
Mavericks was what I used on my first Mac. I have a fondness for it.
When Tim Cook took over Apple's priority became emoji genders and shades and product quality took a dive
That wasn’t exactly just Apple, as the Unicode Emoji standards dictates that. Apple probably submitted a few but also so did MS, Google, Facebook, yahoo and anyone maintaining a emoji library.
I can’t imagine that takes away much from development rather any quality dips are conscience choice by apple (like not delaying a launch) with the resources they have.
I loved Mavericks. Even on a iMac7,1 with only two gigabytes it absolutely sung made that computer felt like a brand new machine on Mavericks.
For me Mavericks takes the crown, the most beautiful dock & icons ever.
The fact that they shitcanned PPC support so soon is a big part of why I upgraded my personal 16” to an M1 Max even though my 8C intel chip was plenty fast for my personal coding projects. I’m betting by next year or maybe 2024, no more intel support. Got out of it only paying $500 to use the machine for a couple years and I can feel confident that I’ll get the newest MacOS through 2026 at least.
I am running Monterey on an Alienware Area 51m Laptop and with a desktop CPU and replaceable GPU. I like the ability to swap components, hence why i built this hackintosh than purchasing the M1
I used Snow Leopard from 2008 to 2020. No kidding, 2020. That's because I kept upgrading my Macbook white 2008 with more RAM and storage. I loved Snow Leopard because it was fast, reliable and extremely stable. I tried Lion, 10.7 (the latest OS supported by the Macbook) in 2010 for a few months, but it was buggy and much slower. I switched back to 10.6 and stack to it for the next 10 years.
That’s impressive as browser support died 2013ish for it, meaning it’d been pretty rough surfing the web.
@@dmug Not really, Chrome dropped support to Snow Leopard in 2016, with version 49: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Google_Chrome_release_compatibility
Great video, thanks for the awesome work on upscaling the backgrounds!
Thanks to watching to the end, I think most people miss that.
@@dmug yes....I own several old Macs with Snow Leopard due to old software that work divinely on them even on a datat core 2 duo with more ram and ssd and when I go back to my MBP m1Max I don't feel a big difference in the use of the interface.... yet how much faster is an M1Max than a 2006 desktop computer?!
To me, Mojave is peak macOS. I only started using it with 10.12, so I never got the chance to experience Mavericks, SL, etc, and while 10.11-10.14 didn't bring any major changes, it was wholly improvement, which can't be said about the later OSes, stability really took a drop with Catalina, and I don't think it's still recovered. Big Sur was fine, Monterey was fine on x86, but brought issues on M1 (like disabling booting from external media, which was completely fine on Big Sur).
Honestly, Ventura 13 is one of the worst releases in recent history, with the new System Settings app, policy changes that required Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox & friends to make their apps completely unusable & stability issues (which could probably be blamed with my switch to M1 (and all the USB/TB related stability issues that come with it), from a Hackintosh)
Mojave was the last OS I felt like Apple had before going nuts with security and bad reasons for dropping support.
If I’m not mistaken for apple silicon you have to reduce the security settings for external media booting.
10.6 was the pinnacle. For programmers there are things improved in later versions but from user point of view it's only downhill from there. Yes, there was a slowdown of the downhill at 10.9 but UX stuff broken in the previous two remained. Oh, and G5 "quad" had no problems whatsoever playing 1080p. That's just nonsense or you had a completely different one than I had 😛
Even though it was 2.5 ghz and had 2 dual core cpus, I don't think a CPU from 2000/2001 could even handle something like 1080p. Most likely you just had a graphics card installed in it.
There was no integrated graphics in those machines. One had to have graphics card installed. But again, the "quad" (2005) had no problems handling 1080p at all, even with the lower specc'd graphics card (there were two options).
I was birthed into my Apple Era way back in the °I Switched° ad campaign with a dual G4 PowerMac and ;OS X 10.2.3 ‘Jaguar’. Coming from Windows and Linux I was absolutely amazed. Happy memories. I distinctly remember the excitement of 10.3 and 10.4. I can’t believe it’s almost twenty years ago now.
I wish the powerPC version of snow leopard had more support. it works but its so limited..pretty buggy also
Am I the only one who absolutely loved Vista? Yet at the same time I always wanted a Mac.
Vista was much like XP really took service packs to bring it around. I had a media pc that ran vista and it really seemed run problem free after Vista SP2 or something.
From my perspective, I think the constant pestering for security and people jamming it on old hardware harmed its reputation. it was never able recover from that and followed up by Windows 7 which really was a solid OS and didn’t have significantly higher requirements like Vista did compared to XP.
@@dmug I only upgraded to 7 in 2011, and being a Vista user for 3 years, it was pretty underwhelming, in fact, the tweaked design language was even more basic and bland. Other than that it's still pretty great.
Also, macOS Mavericks is probably the most inconsistent version design wise, like, it came out the same year as iOS 7 yet for some reason it doesn't look alike at all, only some apps got flattened and they look uglier than in Yosemite, yet their icons are still the same, and then the new apps like Maps and iBooks look like total jokes, especially their icons, all this clashed with the skeuomorphic design language of the rest of the OS, and it made transitioning feel not very seamless. Other than that it was probably the best version of macOS I've tried, never owned a Mac, but I've demoed it with my cousin's MacBook Air back in 2014, will never forget it. When I get that 2008 aluminum MacBook, I'm gonna be dual booting Snow Leopard and Mavericks, just because of how fantastic they are.
Great video ! Installed Mavericks on my 2008 macPro, it's still a great OS and I personally love the UI.
Apple should bring Aqua UI back !
10.6 felt great because 10.5 was sooooo sloowwww, but they pale in comparisson to 10.4 which in my opinion is the greatest OS X to ever ship
I still have my CD for it
No clue if I still have mine, it wasn’t retail, came with my Mac Pro
I also, still have my Snow Leopard CD. In addition, daily I still use OS X 10.6 on some of my Apple vintage desktop and laptop systems (smile...smile).
I hope that Linux support on Apple Arm chips continues to progress. It would allow people to run a modern os long after Apple officially discontinues support.
I kept Mac OS X Mavericks for a very long time. Until the end of 2018. Then I tried El Capitan for a while and then left Mac completely and switched to Linux. I still love to play with my grey G3 with Sonnet G4 and enjoy Mac OS 9 and Tiger. Now I occasionally use Macs on Hackintoshes when I need Adobe products, but only because it's still 10% better than Windows. For me, Apple ended when they started focusing on merging iOS and Mac OS X.
I remember not being able to sleep because I was too excited to install Mavericks on VMWare... Good days!
I started with Mac OS 9.2 which was incredible and I'm now on the latest Mac OS 12.6. With that said, I still believe Snow Leopard is/was the best at least for music/G4 computer to Mac Pro and though it wasn't the fastest, I would say it was the most stable. Now, you mentioned Maverick which was really fast and pretty stable. I upgraded late on this one so, I had to pay for it but, was well worth it for the Mac Pro 2009 tower. By the way, The Mac Pro 2009/2010 5.1 towers were thee best period as far as Mac hardware. Anyway, though Maverick really didn't highlight anything, and was a no thrills OS and best for the 5.1 tower, these new OS's and hardware are so powerful that it's crazy. Now, if we can get the stableness of SL or Mav in the next OS Ventura, I would be 100% happy! Great video!
Honestly, the stability of OS X since the transition to macOS naming has been rock solid to me.
I can't remember the last time I had to use time machine to do a restore outside of a HDD dying (2015?). These days, the issues are compatibility related and the rough edges of Apple changing its UI, at least for me.
Also, it helps that I'm running modern hardware too, M1 Max, M1 Pro (work provided) and a Mac Pro 2019 so my perception is from someone with serious hardware
I think 10.6 and 10.14 are the best Mac OS X versions, so both of them are installed on my MacBook Air. 10.14 is for compatibility with the modern applications (btw it is the last macOS with the minimum 2 gb of ram requirement). But when I want to last on battery as long as possible, I boot into 10.6, which is super optimised and extremely fast (it takes less then 5 seconds to fully boot to the desktop from the moment when power button is pressed!) 10.6 is on top because it reminds how good macOS can be: super fast, super energy-efficient, super stable and very beautiful! So it holds special place as the best Mac OS X version in my opinion. 2nd place is taken by 10.14, 3rd by 10.11.
I am still bummed out about apple removing 32-bit support :(
remember my first expirence with apple was made with an core i7 920 hackintosh and i still have the snow leopard dvd laying arround.
it was so much a difference between windows that i bought my first mac short after that.. 😌
I remember people reviewing Snow Leopard when it came out, they were pissed they had to pay anything for it because it felt like a Leopard Service Pack and Apple gave out previous versions of Mac OSX for free and I don't recall which one, I'm assuming Mac OS 10.1 or 10.2 because OSX had a rocky start.
Incredible Video Greg, nice work!
Thanks!
ive installed snow leopard on a 13 inch mid 2012 MacBook Pro and late 2012 Mac mini using a modified mach_kernel
Amazing video... Mavericks was such a good OS and - in my opinion - really helped start the transition into the modern Mac era!
Especially since it was pretty inconsistent in terms of design
Mavericks forever.. totally agree.. i have the wave as a wallpaper still today
Snow Leopard was actually the first Mac OS I used, it came preinstalled on the first iMac I bought.
Snow Leopard was for sure the best macOS :D
I agree Snow Leopard was the best Operating System (OS) period. Daily, I still use it on some of my vintage Apple computers.
Tiger was my first interaction with OSX on the fabulous Black Macbook.
I loved the experience to install the OS and the secondary CD with additional software.
OS X was based on the XNU kernel, not FreeBSD. XNU was derived from Mach and was used in NeXTSTEP.
I used Snow Leopard on a gorgeous white MacBook through University years. I trusted that computer with my life.
This is great! Exactly the kind of content that I love to see. Could you make a followup video where you rank every version of macOS (10.0 to 13)? I would watch that over and over
Thanks for the high praise, I have a video about Nvidia and Apple in the works that you’ll probably enjoy. Stick around for a month or two and it’ll drop.
he basically just did.
It's quite interesting to see how much loved Snow Leopard is, it was the OS I entered the Apple Ecosystem with in early 2011, however I never had that many problems with Vista. I kind of stayed on High Sierra for the longest time.
First of all, excellent and thought provoking video. Personally, I don't think about the "best version of Mac OS, but rather, my "favorite" version. My favorites, from top to bottom, are. Leopard, Mac OS 9, Big Sur, High Sierra, and El Capitan.
I appreciated your shout-out to Leopard as the first modern Mac OS. I have often said the same thing. I too used Panther as my first full time Mac OS. I was very happy with it, and saw no real reason to pay the $120 for Tiger. When Leopard came out, I definitely did. Time Machine, Spaces, and so much more, how could I pass it?
I never used Mac OS 9 in it's heyday, but I gained an appreciation fo rit using Classic on Panther. I picked up an older machine that would run it natively, and I loved it. It was light, fast, and did what it did very, very well. In today's world it is very limited, but it can still run those old games really well, and I use it frequently for just that.
Big Sur was a very solid release when Apple really needed one. It prepared the way for Apple Silicon Macs, and still ran very well on Intel machines. I loved the nature dynamic wallpaper, as well. I have upgraded to Monterey, since eventually, we all have to, but I do miss Big Sur.
High Sierra was the version I most anticipated. It is the one that caused me to jump on the beta channel, to see where it was going. The actual changes were not all that obvious, but APFS was huge, and the tighter integration of the "Apple Ecosystem" was very important.
El Cap is a very solid release. It is about as far back as you can go, run it today, and not feel like you are missing out on modern computing. Use an up to date browser and emsil client, and you really can use this OS today, very easily.
Clearly, if you were to pick the "best OS on this list, it would have to be Big Sur. However, my "favorite" is Leopard. If, somehow, it could be made to function within the ecosystem, I would be very happy using it regularly.
Best and favorite I'd say I'm using interchangeably. as its entirely an OpEd about Apple's walled garden under guise as yet-another-right-to-repair-rant by me.
You mention that Windows preserves application compatibility through emulation but this isn’t true. There are compatibility layers you can use for misbehaving applications but many will work out of the box because the libraries are still there. Full tilt Space Cadet still works fine out of the box and it came out in 1995.
Oh he forgot to mention the lack of the boot chime with 2016 Macs with Sierra and it's return with Big Sur. And I'm sad to report that the infamous sosumi is gone as well!
They never let the 64 but g5 run 64 but snow leopard.
It 64 bit promise was never realized.
Apple even tried to say it could not run logic pro and final cut pro, even though it could.
Now we are going to do it again with apple silicon.
They need to bring back spaces as it was implemented in Snow Leopard... was the best windows management feature of any OS, EVER!
One of the visiting speakers to my camera club, couldn’t run her Keynote presentation on the club’s MacBook Pro using OS X Yosemite. The only answer I could find was to upgrade to 12 Monterey.
Sounds about correct for Yosemite.
wow! So interesting, thanks! My first own Mac was an iMac 2013 with OS X Mavericks, and it was so great! Then Yosemite was a disaster in term of stability but brought to the Mac very cool Continuity features I still use everyday. Then I was invited to Apple to participe in their invite-only Apple Seeding program to test macOS versions and have direct link with engineers: it was really cool! Even though El Capitan-Catalina updates weren't the most interesting ones, our group had power to send reports that resulted in things getting fixed or improved, as a result of a single bug report. Then Apple totally rewrote their internal tool to manage bugs, and they don't care about us anymore, AT ALL! Only widely reported issue are sometimes fixed, but we can see stability has decreased dramatically! And part of that is that Apple now relies on customers to do QA testing... but at the same time doesn't really give them any consideration (only issue that an AI determines are widely reported have chances to be seen by engineer... so even widely reported issue that are not classified as such by this broken AI are never seen by engineers... and individual report don't matter anymore...). Apple has gotten from the best company in the world to one of the worst (price increase, lack of stability, lack of reparability, lack of support for the latest macOS versions, ...)
Thank you! I like Tiger and Snow Leopard a lot, but I’ve been arguing that Mavericks was the best for a while now. I still have it running on an old MBP and it’s still (mostly) usable today.
Tiger was when OS X really felt like it was all grown up. I think my G5 shipped with it. I'd like to have spent more time on each OS and I really do like Snow Leopard too, just though that everyone argues for Apple to do a "maintenance" release instead of throwing random new features at the user, and that's exactly what Mavericks was.
@@dmug I didn't get into Macs until a few years back, but when I did a bunch of people decided to give me their old ones so I've got ones running Tiger, Snow Leopard, Mavericks, El Capitan, and Catalina. I like the look and feel of the first three the best, but stick primarily to Catalina to get stuff done. I think that's why I like Mavericks so much. It's like the best of both worlds with still working while having the older OS X look.
Also, I appreciate your site. One of those old Macs was a Mac Pro 1,1 and your guides have been immensely helpful!
I had a 2009 MacBook Pro that was terribly hot, but it ran everything from SL, Mavericks to El Cap and even Mojave.
Mavericks ran best on it, and skeuomorphism worked really well non even non-retina display. Second fastest is SL and Windows 10, last place is any flat design OSX.
I have to say tho, snow leopard felt like Windows XP. No nonsense and responsive like no other, even though the applications are slower and battery life shorter, the cursor has lower latency.
I think everything before Yosemite was good, and everything after, especially that flat design, that's why I loved Snow Leopard so much for its amazing design. The flat is just garbage and I can't look at it. Mavericks was excellent middle ground where it looked somewhat flat, but still had the charm and character of OS X.
I had a brand new Core2Duo MBP running Leopard and the dev beta of Snow Leopard ran circles around it on the same hardware.
My macOS of choice would be Mojave by the way.
I loved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 🐆! It had some bugs (especially one where it erases stuff from your hard drive). But once the point updates came through the OS was stout, fast, intuitive, & extremely stable.
Also, it had all the features of Leopard 10.5 but refined them perfectly.
I loved those candy bar icons in OSX the aqua look was their best IMHO...
Mavericks undoubtably had the best default wallpaper for any OS ever
Was a Mac user since the 90s but no longer. Remember Apple computer dropped the computer from its name. They hate power users and I finally jumped ship at Big Sur. They just want to make disposable consumer electronics. Tired of being spied on. Linux is my main system running on my Mac Pro 5,1 and while it isn’t terrible it sucks. I miss those Snow lep days for sure. Mavericks was great too. Great video!
I’d say they really don’t care about a certain kind of power user as the latest MacBook Pros are pretty much the best laptop money can buy for many use cases.
The ideal Apple professional has a work provided MacBook where the business seems the stability and low maintenance as a savings on IT and support. Freelancers, contractors and edge case users they’re much less interested in.
I appreciate your perspective and will not argue with the notion that Mavericks was a great release, but for Apple hardware of a certain vintage and spec, Snow Leopard delivers a subjective experience that I can’t get with any other release. Boot times-even on spinning rust-rival SSD boots of modern OSes. The number of running background services (out of the box) fits in a single window, no scrolling. The drain on resources doesn’t require the admitted innovation Mavericks brought to the table, because it was a significantly lighter OS to begin with. That’s not to say it’s feature superior, it’s not, and I agree that what we’re all saying is we want a more Mac-centric Apple, but I just wanted to offer my perspective as to why I have such a fondness for Snow Leopard all these later. Owning three machines Snow Leopard-based machines that all still function quite well, it’s just unbeatable for my specific use case. I will have to give Mavericks another test run on my SSD equipped machines. Thank you for your work!
Tiger and Snow Leopard were absolutely fantastic, I can't speak for Mavericks because I went directly from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, and after Yosemite, I was so sick of the ongoing direction of OS X that I switched to Windows. I still love my old Macs though.
So wise in info, not by inexperienced person, so unbiased, so wise, so clear, many infos that casual tech people and even geeks won't talk about
Amazing effort and style
Let's not forget Tiger, released as an update to PPc Macs in 2005, was shipped with all early Intel Macs. I purchased the first MacPro 1.1 3.0Ghz in early October 2006. Then I updated it to Leopard and subsequently to Snow Leopard which I found great: stable, fast, all the apps installed on Tiger worked, even those left only for PowerPc.
Only Maverik made me feel that thrill of stability and speed again.
Even now that I still have 3 MP 2.1, 3.1 and 5.1 and work steadily on an M1Max, Maverik and Snow Leopard I find them wonderfully excellent. If you then upgrade the RAM to 8Gb and a nice SSD, then you'll fly with these machines.
Apple forces its users to update simply by removing app support... for no real reason; see 32bit apps or OpenGL support, minimalist single color icons 🤬. It puts a lot of useless things into the current OS, while it would be sufficient to allow the use of old apps.
Before even watching the video I can confidently answer "yes" from a visual and stability perspective (although for the most part MacOS has always been stable for me). However, that doesn't mean I'm salty that things changed. Design trends changed and Apple's target is the mass demographic, not me. My god do I miss that 3D Dock though. The welcome video too.
Bear in mind the first Mac that I ever owned and booted up was the 2010 model running Snow Leopard and it was the Leopard design that first attracted me to MacOS so there is definitely bias there.
I found a MBA on snow lepoard from 2012, that thing was amazing. also that game center app is so nostalgic