Why would it mean that?
It's a myth that Snow Leopard was a bug fix release. Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8, indeed brought several new severe bugs. However, Mac OS X 10.6 received two years of minor bug fix updates afterward, which eventually made it the OS that people reminiscence about now.
Apple's strict yearly schedule makes "another Snow Leopard" impossible. At this point, Apple has accumulated so much technical debt that they'd need much more than 2 years of minor bug fix updates.
> It's a myth that Snow Leopard was a bug fix release.
> Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8
Somebody who worked on Snow Leopard has already disagreed with you here about those things:
> As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish).
> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".
> During that time period my team and I triaged every single Mac OS X bug coming into the company every morning. Trust me, SL was of higher quality than Leopard.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675#43439348
> Apple's strict yearly schedule makes "another Snow Leopard" impossible. At this point, Apple has accumulated so much technical debt that they'd need much more than 2 years of minor bug fix updates.
I don’t think the schedule matters. They just over-commit every time. I said elsewhere:
> [Apple] were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse.
> A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time.
> More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later.
> And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later.
> This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436105
> Somebody who worked on Snow Leopard has already disagreed with you here about those things:
It's instructive to read the entire thread, not just the few sentences you quoted. For example, that person later admits, "So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8."
> I don’t think the schedule matters. They just over-commit every time.
That's a distinction without a difference. Apple has committed to releasing major OS updates every year on schedule. That's a recipe for over-committment, because they need to produce enough changes to market it as a major release.
The "no new features" gimmick of Snow Leopard was a marketing lie but was also unique. It's a gimmick that Apple pulled only once, and it couldn't be repeated frequently by Apple without making a mockery of the whole annual schedule. Maybe they could do it a second time now, but in general the annual schedule is still a major problem for a number of reasons.
It should also be noted that Snow Leopard itself took 2 years to produce after Leopard.
Not sure why you’re downvoted because you’re right.
Snow leopard brought a huge amount of under the covers features. It was a massive release. The only reason it had that marketing was because they didn’t have a ton of user facing stuff to show
That is more or less what users asking for another Snow Leopard want: a release that doesn't have gratuitous UI churn and superficial changes, doesn't break the end user's muscle memory, but instead focuses on deep-seated and long-standing issues under the hood. If the right thing for the OS in the long term is to replace an entire subsystem instead of applying more band-aid fixes, then take the time to do a proper job of it.
lapcat loves his straw man about OS X 10.6.0 having plenty of bugs, but that misses the point of Snow Leopard. Of course a release that makes changes as fundamental as re-writing the Finder and QuickTime to use the NeXT-derived frameworks rather than the classic Mac OS APIs, and moving most of the built-in apps to 64-bit, is going to introduce or uncover plenty of new bugs. But it fixed a bunch of stubborn bugs and architectural limitations, and the new bugs mostly got ironed out in a reasonable time frame. (Snow Leopard was probably one of the better examples of Apple practicing what they preach: cleaning out legacy code and modernizing the OS and bundled apps the way they usually want third-party developers to do to their own apps.)
Fixing architectural bugs is still fixing bugs—just at a deeper level than a rapid release schedule driven by marketable end-user features easily allows for.
> a release that doesn't have gratuitous UI churn and superficial changes
There have actually been quite a few of those releases. Some of the California-themed updates have been practically indistinguishable from the previous versions. Of course Tahoe and Big Sur brought huge UI changes, but those are the exceptions, not the norm.
> focuses on deep-seated and long-standing issues under the hood
Which issues would those be, specifically?
> If the right thing for the OS in the long term is to replace an entire subsystem
Which subsystems need replacement? You claim that this is what people mean by wanting another Snow Leopard, but which subsystems do people want replaced?
> misses the point of Snow Leopard
I haven't missed the point of Snow Leopard. You're conflating two entirely different things: (1) the point of Snow Leopard as conceived by Apple in 2008-ish and (2) why people in 2025 look back fondly at Snow Leopard. My claim is that the fond memories are the result of the quality and stability that were themselves the result of 2 full years of bug fixes AFTER the initial release of Snow Leopard. Whereas the initial quality of Snow Leopard was not great, just like the initial quality of all major OS updates is not great. Major updates invariably make software buggier, and the quality comes only after much time spent refining the new stuff.
My contention is that the marketing lie of "no new features", which is naturally very memorable, is the reason that a lot of people associate Snow Leopard with bug fixes and quality, but that's not actually what 10.6.0 brought, and the quality came much later in time.
I'm not saying that Snow Leopard didn't bring valuable changes. I'm just saying that Snow Leopard existed in various stages over 2 years, and the high quality version of Snow Leopard that we remember fondly now is actually late-stage Snow Leopard, not early-stage Snow Leopard, and those 2 years of minor bug fix releases were crucial. Moreover, that's what we need now, a long series of minor bug fix updates, not any new major updates. The bug backlog has become a mountain.
> Of course a release that makes changes as fundamental as re-writing the Finder and QuickTime to use the NeXT-derived frameworks rather than the classic Mac OS APIs, and moving most of the built-in apps to 64-bit, is going to introduce or uncover plenty of new bugs.
Which is why I think it's very wrong to claim that people want "another Snow Leopard". Snow Leopard II released in 2026 would be much buggier than even macOS Tahoe, which is precisely what people do NOT want, a bunch more bugs.
> But it fixed a bunch of stubborn bugs
Which bugs exactly?
> Fixing architectural bugs is still fixing bugs
Which architectural bugs do you have in mind, or more relevantly, which architectural bugs do people in general have in mind when saying that they want another Snow Leopard?