Comment by al_borland

> Somebody who worked on Snow Leopard has already disagreed with you here about those things:

It's instructive to read the entire thread, not just the few sentences you quoted. For example, that person later admits, "So yeah, if you are comparing the most stable polished/fixed/stagnant last major version with the brand new 1.0 major version branch, the newer major is going to be buggier. That would be the case with every y.0 vs x.8."

> I don’t think the schedule matters. They just over-commit every time.

That's a distinction without a difference. Apple has committed to releasing major OS updates every year on schedule. That's a recipe for over-committment, because they need to produce enough changes to market it as a major release.

The "no new features" gimmick of Snow Leopard was a marketing lie but was also unique. It's a gimmick that Apple pulled only once, and it couldn't be repeated frequently by Apple without making a mockery of the whole annual schedule. Maybe they could do it a second time now, but in general the annual schedule is still a major problem for a number of reasons.

It should also be noted that Snow Leopard itself took 2 years to produce after Leopard.

That is more or less what users asking for another Snow Leopard want: a release that doesn't have gratuitous UI churn and superficial changes, doesn't break the end user's muscle memory, but instead focuses on deep-seated and long-standing issues under the hood. If the right thing for the OS in the long term is to replace an entire subsystem instead of applying more band-aid fixes, then take the time to do a proper job of it.

lapcat loves his straw man about OS X 10.6.0 having plenty of bugs, but that misses the point of Snow Leopard. Of course a release that makes changes as fundamental as re-writing the Finder and QuickTime to use the NeXT-derived frameworks rather than the classic Mac OS APIs, and moving most of the built-in apps to 64-bit, is going to introduce or uncover plenty of new bugs. But it fixed a bunch of stubborn bugs and architectural limitations, and the new bugs mostly got ironed out in a reasonable time frame. (Snow Leopard was probably one of the better examples of Apple practicing what they preach: cleaning out legacy code and modernizing the OS and bundled apps the way they usually want third-party developers to do to their own apps.)

Fixing architectural bugs is still fixing bugs—just at a deeper level than a rapid release schedule driven by marketable end-user features easily allows for.