Was Snow Leopard 10.6 greatest macOS release ever? An OS X essay

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard long has been held as the gold standard for OS X/macOS releases. It's not uncommon to hear people to this day laud Snow Leopard as the best version of any Apple OS. There's been a felt attempts to contextualize why Snow Leopard was so loved with solid points but they fall a bit short.

Corrections:
OS X's kernel is from Mach from NeXTSTEP, which NeXSTEP borrowed additional kernel layers and low-level user space code derived from parts of BSD .

Written version (with sources)

0:00 Opening
0:39 Snow Leopard: The Myth, The Legend
1:27 OS X 10.0 - 10.1 Cheetah and Puma CORRECTION based off NeXSTEP Kernel (see corrections)
2:13 OS X 10.2 Jaguar aka "Jagwire"
3:03 OS X 10.3 Panther
3:40 OS X 10.4 Tiger
4:31 OS X 10.5 Leopard
4:51 OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
9:16 Macs, iPods, iPhones, iTunes and Steve
10:10 OS X 10.7 - 10.8 - Lion and Mountain Lion
10:51: OS X 10.9 Mavericks
12:55 OS X 10.9 Mavericks Virtual Memory Compression and other tech
15:07 OS X 10.10 Yosemite
15:36 OS X/macOS 10.11 - 10.14 El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave
16:26 Windows 8 - 10
18:03 macOS 10.15 Catalina, a period of regression
19:11 A gated community: Big Sur / Monterey
20:24 The Crux
21:41 Disclaimer
21:54 Bonus Content! Upscaled Desktops!

In this video, my goal is to explain why Snow Leopard was the most loved OS X release but more importantly what version of OS X I'd argue was the high water mark for OS X ;)

This video has been a labor of love from someone who's used every version of OS X including the beta (which I bought back in the year 2000), who's somewhere between Mac aficionado and Apple skeptic, and author of a few popular online guides related Apple hardware. My first Mac of my own was a PowerMac G3 (in 1999), and since I've owned a PowerBook G3 Pismo, G4, G5, Mac Pro 2008, MacBook 2007 white, MacBook 2008 (Unibody), Mac Pro 2010, Mac Pro 2019, and an M1 Max. I also have had work provided MacBook Pros for years (2013, 2015, 2017, 2021). I even built a short lived hacktinosh. I say this not to brag but rather to say, I've experienced OS 9 and especially OS X on quite a bit of hardware.

Everything in this video is from my own lived experience, from bouncing around between esoteric web browsers in days before Safari, like Omniweb, Chimera/Camino, Mozilla, and dual booting to OS 9 to run Photoshop 5.5. OS X/macOS is the glue that keeps me bound to Apple's computers as if Apple were to magically offer macOS for any hardware, I doubt I'd ever bought another Apple desktop post 2010.... and it shouldn't be that way.

Lastly, 10.6 was a great release of OS X. Don't get it twisted.

Please share this video if you enjoyed it as it's taken far far far too much time to make.

Bonus Content!
Every OS X (macOS) 10.6 Snow Leopard Nature Desktop - in Glorious 5k Resolution

Every OS X Snow Leopard Abstract Desktop - in Glorious 5k and 8k Resolution

Links:
The Mac, The Myth, The Legend: How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability

Early Benchmarks Of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Snow Leopard vs. Lion: Performance head-to-head

OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review

Future is a gated community (my reaction to the 2013 Mac Pro announcement in 2013)

Wanna talk retro Mac OS/OS X with a small group people? Check out The Tech Corner run by fellow YouTube creator, Quinn of Tech Corner. It's where I talk tech.

Video/Music/Editing by me. FCPX/Motion/Pixelmator Pro/Sketch/Cubase/Ableton.

Topics covered in passing:
Mac gaming, Steve Jobs, nVidia, planned obsolescence, walled garden, future of the Mac

[dmug]

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.

[Satchel]

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.

[davejohnsonmusic]

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.

[MichaelSidneyTimpson]

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.

[NickSiekierski]

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.

[jamesburland]

You had to be there. Snow Leopard was everything done right. There will never be a more perfectly crafted Macintosh operating system.

[thorbio]

Catalina dropping 32-bit support is a thing I can never forgive

[sirfabyan]

putting snow leopard on my hackintosh at 12 years old was probably my biggest tech accomplishment at the time lol, loved that OS

[GrandmaHasDied]

I worked for Apple support during Yosemite’s launch. It was beyond painful. All our Macs in the call centre were upgraded to a Yosemite golden master release just ahead of the official launch; so we’d be familiar with it before customers got their hands on it en masse.

Crashes and performance issues were a constant in the office. It wasn’t uncommon for reps to be stuck rebooting their iMacs several times a day.

The people calling in didn’t fair much better. Most of my Mac-related calls were users who wanted to downgrade back to Mavericks.

[jonesingfame]

After Steve Jobs passing, the Mac community desperately needs you to be on Apple's payroll as Steve's successor! Amen!

[MaxSebastien]

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.

[michaelmanus]

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.

[xX_cumtech_Xx]

Finally someone talks about Mavericks!
I still use it to this very day: I love the design, the feel, the speed, everything.

[errorsofmodernism]

When Tim Cook took over Apple's priority became emoji genders and shades and product quality took a dive

[askhowiknow]

Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion: a triad was the best

[XstonedmonkeyzX]

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 💪

[jfmezei]

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).

[MacinMindSoftware]

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.

[marklsimonson]

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.

[RobloxianX]

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.