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The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing.

Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.

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Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it crashing under duress.

Early versions of Snow Leopard did have a bug that could delete all the data on your hard drive. :)

10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta.

Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*

Snow Leopard was great to work on. When we were told the next release of OSX would focus on stability and performance, morale went way up. Having a massive backlog of bugs felt like an unseen energy vampire, sucking away the will to live. You just knew some user out there is hating life because you don't have time to address their issue. The Radar issue count for Finder was in the tens of thousands alone and it could be argued each bug was worthy of being fixed.

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