Comment by WillAdams
3 days ago
One notable standout here was 10.6 which was simply 10.5 recompiled for native Intel and dropping PowerPC support --- that said, for early 10.x each version consistently became more performant up through 10.5, it's just that 10.6 was the version where that was the _raison d'être_.
10.6 was absolutely not 10.5 recompiled. It was entirely a reliability and bug fix release on top of 10.5.
Poor choice of word on my part/missing "re-written" and that it was reliability/bug fixes/removing PPC stuff was what I was trying to convey.
I know this isn't your point, but it actually seems like PPC got dropped from Snow Leopard at the last minute. Early developer preview disks worked on PowerPC Macs. The stability didn't come from dropping PPC.