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Comment by waynecochran | Hacker News Reader

Snow Leopard was the greatest OS update of my lifetime. That was the only year I went to WWDC and they were handing out the DVD as I was waiting in line. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES (except some support for MS Exchange). There is a concept -- release an OS that makes your machine more stable and faster -- nothing else. Rock solid OS. That was pinnacle of all OS updates.

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NO NEW FEATURES was totally marketing that just went along with not changing the UI. Like you said they added Grand Central Dispatch and Exchange support, they rewrote Finder in Cocoa, released QuickTime X, OpenCL support, and introduced the Mac App Store. They also made significant updates to BootCamp, Safari, and ported stuff to 64-bit. It also had a data loss bug with guest accounts that was later fixed in a point release.

I do think it ended up being a great release, but I don't attribute it to "no new features." I think being the 6th or 7th major release, 3rd with Intel support, 6 years of support, mixed with good release planning and engineering, and luck helped it be so beloved.

NO NEW FEATURES was indeed marketing. There were many new features.

However, as your list shows, the vast majority of those features were under the hood improvements that had little to no user interface changes.

And that’s what Apple meant by no new features. Their work in Snow Leopard was entirely focused on improving the underpinnings of Snow Leopard through both bug fixes and infrastructural changes.

There were fewer new user-visible features, so they could focus on optimization and stability (which includes things like Grand Central Dispatch and rewriting Finder to use a modern API).

QuickTime X was a big deal, but it was probably the largest user-facing new feature—the Mac App Store wasn't added until a year after launch.

Mountain Lion, El Capitan, and High Sierra were all similar to Snow Leopard in their priorities.

Rewriting Finder is huge and risky! When they replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd it caused problems they eventually reverted it when Vint Cerf called Tim Cook to complain.

I might be misremembering, but I through I heard a story of some meeting where "no new features" was branded close to release. Not something decided early in the dev cycle. The feature list for Snow Leopard actually looks larger than Lion to me.

I think another factor was a shift in development. Leopard was $129 and Snow Leopard was $29 and the last released on a disk. Lion was $29, Mountain Lion was $19, and Mavericks and onward were free.

> Rewriting Finder is huge and risky! When they replaced mDNSResponder with discoveryd it caused problems they eventually reverted it when Vint Cerf called Tim Cook to complain.

But it's not the size, it's the focus, right? Rewriting Finder, without adding any additional capabilities, reduces technical debt and makes Finder faster and more stable. Adding QuickLook to Finder doesn't do any of those things, it just allows you to use QuickLook.

I have another theory though, and it's not the price—Apple has plenty of money—it's the development cycle. Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard had several years of life before they were replaced. Every OS since Lion has been replaced within a year.

> I heard a story of some meeting where "no new features" was branded close to release. Not something decided early in the dev cycle.

I hadn't heard this story, but I wonder if both could be true. The roadmap was probably planned early on, but the narrative could have been chosen later.

You can imagine an alternate universe where Steve Jobs walked on stage and announced "Snow Leopard comes with a brand new Finder, and it's better than ever!"

Totally agree! I really hope Apple does another modern Snow Leopard type of update with no new features -- just optimizations. Although, going from Big Sur on an Intel Mac to an M1 Mac _felt_ similar -- everything is just snappy.

Remember Mojave?

Remember it? I'm still running Mojave on my iMac! I do keep it updated. I prefer the ability to run older 32-bit stuff, and have one old app I haven't upgraded.

Me also. I'm holding off because if I upgrade my scanner driver will be obsoleted and I'll have to buy a new scanner. I hate throwing away perfectly good hardware. When I have the time I'll try to set up a scanner station using a Raspberry Pi and some FOSS software to drive the scanner.

Have you tried VueScan? They seem to support plenty of scanners, including my Canon P208 [1] which required Canon's proprietary capture software before.

[1] https://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/canon_p_208.html

Actually, Mojave was noticeably slower on my older Macbook Air. I suspect because they switched the UI to use Metal for everything.

I would have used High Sierra as the example.

I've recently upgraded to mojave from el capitan and i must say i hate it.

"Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) was introduced and there we NO NEW FEATURES"

run that past me again please

User-facing, I assume

Yes -- there were a many new features "under the hood".

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