This idea is so powerful—and so longed for—that it’s escaped containment among the Apple crowd. I’ve seen everything from Linux distro to phone updates referred to as Snow Leopard releases, when their vendors cite stability and bug fixes over new features. Likewise, people plead with their vendors for a Snow Leopard release when they feel quality has slipped. The reality was a bit different. As I wrote at the time: This could be the first time I’ve ever downgraded an Apple OS. As we speak I’m downgrading the Snow Leopard partition on my trusty old Core Duo 2006 MacBook Pro back to Leopard (and while I’m at it, I’m finally getting around to upgrading the FreeBSD partition to 8.0!). I kept waiting for updates to fix the severe stability problems in the Finder, my FireWire 800 ExpressCard and my iMovie HD plugins, but I’ve decided to give up for now. This was putting it mildly.

When I tried it again a few months later, I still had so many problems that I downgraded again, then leapfrogged it for Lion when it was released in 2011. Jeff Johnson has a great post discussing all the problems Snow Leopard introduced and had to have patched. Still, whether Snow Leopard really was this bastion of stability and polish, the myth surrounding its development and stated purpose obviously resonates today. People invoke its memory because they’re broadly craving stability and quality of life improvements, something almost everyone has wilfully discarded as they chase the next rung of enshittification. Apple’s marketing team hit on something so popular that it has staying power sixteen years later. Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person. This blog is powered by the excel…