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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

I’ve long assumed it’s because it also coincidentally lines up with the Intel Macs, and especially the MacBook Air. Which was probably a lot of people’s first Mac ever. It was definitely an upgrade over Leopard.

I had started using OSX with Jaguar on my G4 PowerBook and Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind. I liked Lion more because it had full disk encryption and AirDrop.

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Snow Leopard came with a certain ethos that I think was very appreciated: there were few feature changes and no aesthetic changes, but all the work went into the "under the hood" systems, lowering the memory footprint and preparing for the transition to all 64-bit everything. It was one of the rare times that a software company released a new major version with no consumer-apparent changes except for increased speed and efficiency. HN's audience might have a soft spot for that sort of thing.

Yes to me, snow leopard was the pinacle of macOS, pre-iMessage.

It was faster, smaller, did just as much as leopard, just solid.

Shakes cane in System 7

Also a big Snow Leopard guy here. Learned how to program Python mostly on my old white 13" MacBook. Everything just worked.

Imho the 2008-2012 unibody mbp was peak mac design, before they began compromising things in their quest for thinness.

I really liked the pre-Unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

I have both in my collection. Including one tattered 2006 first-gen Intel MBP that I picked up from a trash heap and restored.

Every time I open that MBP up, the design makes me feel like a high-roller Hollywood producer. I was just thinking the other day that I wish I could have that machine with M1/M2 guts inside of it.

Those plastic MacBooks are also a joy to sit in front of.

And though I thought the unibody MacBooks/Pros looked spaced aged at the time, they kind of look unsightly today. Those black bezels are huge and obnoxious, and give the laptop a raccoon look.

It’s a good point. The Intel transition is when Macs started to take off again, and the first experience is always special. That and a severe dislike of change.

While I have soft spots for 10.2 as that’s when OS X finally became usable and 10.4 when it overtook Windows there’s not a chance I’d want to use any of the older versions on a daily basis - it’s never been better than it is now.

Lion was a little sluggish and buggy at the start, but it proved itself to be a fine transitional release, and I agree about those feature additions - loved them!

Personal favorite release was 10.9/Mavericks.

> Snow Leopard doesn’t stand out in my mind

It does for me. It was the first Intel-only release and at the time I had G4 Powerbook. I was quite pissed at Apple at the time.

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