> 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.
> 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.