Correction: 1:37 "Based off the FreeBSD Kernel" - This is only partially correct. As many of you have pointed out, OS X's kernel is based on a heavily modified version of the Mach Kernel with portions from the FreeBSD kernel, which formed the XNU kernel for NeXTSTEP.

Snow leopard was the first version of osx I ever used. So it holds a special place in my heart as one of the best os’s ever made.

Mavs was pretty badass. It was so solid for audio production, that I didn't move from it for years. I still have my SL 10.6.3 retail disc back home. Thanks for the trip down memory lane Greg. That never gets old and you do a great job at presentation.

People just liked Snow Leopard because it was the last OSX supporting Rosetta (1), so a lot of people refused to upgrade, just like those with PPCs refused to upgrade from Tiger due to its ability to still run an OS9 layer.

You had to be there. Snow Leopard was everything done right. There will never be a more perfectly crafted Macintosh operating system.

The most surprising part of all this was that you aren't sitting on at least 100k subs, great video! I got my first MacBook in 2008 so the Snow Leopard release the following year always ties to happy memories of a new, stable and refreshing computing experience and leaving the then-hated Windows of the previous decade behind. I agree that Mavericks was the tops of that era, and it had perhaps the all-time best-matched system wallpaper, that wave perfectly conveyed the speed and power lurking beneath your fingertips.

Catalina dropping 32-bit support is a thing I can never forgive

After Steve Jobs passing, the Mac community desperately needs you to be on Apple's payroll as Steve's successor! Amen!

putting snow leopard on my hackintosh at 12 years old was probably my biggest tech accomplishment at the time lol, loved that OS

I worked for Apple support during Yosemite’s launch. It was beyond painful. All our Macs in the call centre were upgraded to a Yosemite golden master release just ahead of the official launch; so we’d be familiar with it before customers got their hands on it en masse. Crashes and performance issues were a constant in the office. It wasn’t uncommon for reps to be stuck rebooting their iMacs several times a day. The people calling in didn’t fair much better. Most of my Mac-related calls were users who wanted to downgrade back to Mavericks.

I had to smile at the mention of Microsoft Vista. At work, we had to examine it as a potential OS and that is when I made the personal jump to Apple Macs. I grew up in the early days of DOS and when Windows was not on every computer. Of recent, I had made mention how there was a time when OSX, even with its foibles was a fun OS for home users. You covered some of those OSs here and that is appreciated.

When Tim Cook took over Apple's priority became emoji genders and shades and product quality took a dive

Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion: a triad was the best

I do agree with this. Mavericks was the most stable system I used. Running daily Pro Tools and Traktor on a MBP 2008I had only one issue when my hard drive died.

I WAS JUST THINKING of old Mac OS versions this week, and the gift of the OLD WALLPAPERS was the best thing ever for waiting till the end of a video hahaha 💪

10.6 was a milestone release which I appreciated more once 10.7 came out. 10.6 was a pause on features to polish and streamline. I held many Macs back on 10.6, especially unattended/server or limited use Macs. One 10.6.3 Mac has been running audio 24/7 for 12 years with only a reboot to take it out and clean the dust out every year or two. I greatly admired the technical improvements with 10.9 and was excited for it, but, it was a nightmare for my case with audio. coreaudiod was hanging and going silent for users of my software. It required a kill command to bring it back and a relaunch of the affected apps using it. It was not fixed until 10.10! It was a very challenging time of uncertainty of whether I could have a reliable software product and stay in business. 10.10 was the first OS to give us AVFoundation support which I believe started on iOS. I was so glad to drop support for 10.9 and amazingly I can still support 10.10 - 13.0 (9 OS releases) with the same build. 10.14 was the next milestone to hold Mac back on, here again appreciated more with the release of 10.15. Other than that 10.9 experience difference, I agree, that's how we lived through it and see it now in retrospect.

Finally someone talks about Mavericks! I still use it to this very day: I love the design, the feel, the speed, everything.

as a mac user since circa 2015 and an aspiring retro mac collector, you've perfectly put into words why i have a soft spot for legacy macOS. i bought an M1 mac mini almost two years ago now to replace my 2018 gaming PC (which has now broke) and its been incredibly reliable for me, only kernel panicking a few times, and nearly every time was on beta software. apple silicon is seriously impressive tech ESPECIALLY for the price, but the planned obsolescence is a HUGE concern for me.

Tiger, Snow Leopard, and Mavericks will always be the big 3 in my heart. They were the versions of Mac OS X I grew up with, and I loved them to bits. I still use my Mid 2009 Mackbook Air (The last one with the flush design before the 2nd gen re-design) with Mavericks. I just love the design of the hardware, and the software is just perfect. Pure platinum.

I loved Mavericks. Even on a iMac7,1 with only two gigabytes it absolutely sung made that computer felt like a brand new machine on Mavericks.

Snow Leopard was the last release before Apple exited the server market. And this also ment slowly removing "unix" services/apps under the hood until "server" became an app. And then Apple started the "back to mac" thing to make a Mac look like an iphone, andded the idiotic semi transparent windows etc. So Apple embarked in glitz in the UI which made subsequent releases vfar less "computer". My teenage 2009 Xserve is still at Snow Leopard and it will be replaced by a Linux box because Apple is no longer in that market. I've been updating some of the open source components (web, mail , php, mysql).

one aspect I didn‘t saw you metioning at all is the fact that SnowLeopard was a maintenance Update. No new features to the Enduser except Exchange Support. All other Changes were similar to those in Mavericks but not in termes of efficiency it was in term of performance and it was a really great experience…

I still have my CD for it

The very first Mac I bought on my own had snow leopard installed from the factory. I LOVED it.

What made 10.6.8 beloved was it was the last version that had Rosetta. That was the reason that 1/3 of the user base was still on 10.6.8 when Sierra was released.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who HATED Yosemite. Up until that release every OSX release felt like an improvement. 10.10 ruined the UI with its ‘flat’ bullshit ported from iOS. It also introduced so many bugs and design issues. I’m a software developer and the 10.10 release broke all of our software with crashes and licensing issues. What a nightmare that month was. I also hate Apple’s ruthless drive to drop ‘legacy’ technology support like X11, PPC, 32bit, HFS/HFS+ and x86 emulation. They do this purely to force upgrades and drives sales.

Since 10.6 they destroyed the Ken Burns screensaver, Expose looks messy now, Spaces was not forced on you, Colour was removed from the sidebar just making things take longer to find, Wallsaver apps dont work anymore, cant hide menubar anymore, full screen apps dont expose anymore. There are literally 100's of downgrades since snow leopard.

Nice video. My favourite OSes are still Tiger and Snow Leopard. I love using them both, so clean and efficient, a real joy. Sure, I miss Airdrop, but that's ok on old Macs anyway. I'd use Jaguar honestly for the aesthetic, but there just isn't enough app support, and it runs a little slow. Slight video correction: the Mac Pro 1,1 doesn't officially support Windows 10. None of the classic Mac Pros (2006-2012) officially support Win 10.

Snow Leopard is the most recent Mac OS that is able to run PPC apps (via Rosetta). I have it on an old 2009 MBP just for that feature.

OS X was based on the XNU kernel, not FreeBSD. XNU was derived from Mach and was used in NeXTSTEP.

You have so many valid points and hit the nail on the head so many times in this vid! As a fellow 7,1 Mac Pro owner I know you shiver over what the future holds for a 5k entry price tag machine. I bought mine only a month before they announced Apple Silicone. I'm worried about the minimum amount of support given for a device I spent so much money on. I justified it remembering the amount of money I spent on my 5,1 nine years earlier, remembering how much use my 5,1 saw in 9 years, understanding inflation, and realizing hardware of the base model is at a higher level than the entry model 5,1 was in 2010. When I bought it prior to the Apple Silicone announcement I expected to get 7 years support, and maybe 10 years unofficial support. Apple needs to tread lightly in this territory with the release of the 8,1 and Apple Silicone transition. It would not benefit Apple to burn Mac Pro users as we're the most loyal fan base. We were already treated badly during the 6,1 trash can era. Piss us off and they will forever burn their most technical and loyal users, this time likely for good! I will be extremely disappointed if I don't get my 7 years out of my 7,1 because they decided to drop support early out of convenience for them. What's the point of spending extra money buying a customizable, upgradeable Mac if you can't own it long enough to get upgrades in before they drop support?!? If they plan to drop support for the 7,1 early they should be transparent about it when the 8,1 comes out. A hefty trade in incentive for all 7,1 owners would go a long way towards the sting of a short changed cycle. BUT the 8,1 has to be worth transitioning to. A lack luster fenced in upgrade like the 6,1 would be a hard pill to swallow from another angle. (I skipped the 6,1 completely due to lack of PCI expansion and the fact my upgraded 5,1 could keep up with a 6,1) I struggle with how you make an upgradeable Pro level machine with system on a chip architecture outside of what's done with a Mac Studio. What make it a Mac Studio with a couple pci slots for a raid or capture card and call it a day? My eyes will be watching the fall announcement with great anticipation to this answer. I love your walled garden HOA analogy. I feel like in the last few years my walled house has gotten a smaller yard because it was taken to widen the street through imminent domain. If apple doesn't handle this transition well, I'll have to rethink what future purchases look like with apple if I choose them at all. From grand and long term to minimalistic and year to year. Another valid point you had was where I was when I jumped into Mac and where we are now as a possible jumping off point. I walked away from Mac and jumped to PC in 93. I bought a 486pc that was cheaper, and had better compatibility with the rest of the world. In 93 Macs were on the decline and files couldn't even be copied between Mac and PC via floppy in a world before everyone had the internet. Mac had Claris Works, PC had WordPerfect. I was fed up. In 06 I was fed up again with Vista and blue screens of death everytime I tried to do real work on my PC restarted. I found out there was more cross compabilty for how disks were read vs the 90s. Apple introduced the 5,1 iMac and it had boot camp! Suddenly i could share files with other people and use windows still, with the bonus of not needing rebuy all my PC software on Mac like I did when I went to PC! And Snow Leopard was an amazing alternative to Vista! I got an 08 white MacBook, then the Mac Pro and I've had dozens MacBooks sense. But now like you said Windows 10 and 11 have come a long way! Are they perfect? No but they're solid for the most part. But Windows is close enough these days for me to make a jump off with amazing horsepower for my dollar. And build quality of many PCs is vastly improved over 16 years ago! Look at Surface and Razer Blade! Just where does PC hardware land in the next 5 years with the release of Windows on ARM and the success of Mac ARM hardware? We're in a unique transitional point for technology right now. It's hard to know where to be but in the now. I just don't want to buy another 5-6k computer to only be burned by lack of support from the manufacturer.

Great video, thanks for the awesome work on upscaling the backgrounds!

i went to my locale goodwill & was bumming around. then i went over to the cd's to see what they have & i found a copy of snow leopard. i bought it right then & there

There are two releases I'll forever hold near and dear to my heart: Snow Leopard and Mavericks. Used both in my late 2011 MBP (Post SL but works perfectly with 10.6.8 update). Now I use it with Arch Linux for obvious reasons.

I can agree with you I use to be so excited about new macOS releases and I haven’t been very excited for a long time. I also liked Mavericks a lot many memories from my experience with it

This was an outstanding video and, I really enjoyed watching it. For myself OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, is the best of the "cat" operating systems. Because like you stated, it came out at a time when Mac desktop systems were the "central hub" for Apple users. Now, the first, second, and last thing out of the mouth of Tim Cook, is always "and with your iPhone ... your air pods, your Apple watch, your iPad, your etc., etc., etc." the new "central hub" for Apple users is the iPhone. Which, is something that, I never plan to own. In 1996, I started using Apple computers and for all systems within my collection that can support it, I always install a copy of Snow Leopard. Also daily, I still enjoy using this vintage operating system with iLife '09. iWorks, '09, MS Office, and for watching and recording HD over the air movies and TV shows (smile...smile).

Been using Mac for 13 years and I kind of agree with you. The days when we actually had to pay and download the OS. 🙂 The SL was also a great version with great new features. However I remember when the flat design was introduced I was blown away!

I like Mac OS X snow leopard because it was the last OS X supporting Rosetta (1), and it also was the first version to introduce the Mac App Store since Mac OS X 10.6.6, a lot of people refused to update their computers and I also refused to upgrade just like those with PowerPCs refused to upgrade from tiger to leopard due to its ability to still run an OS 9 layer.

I wish the powerPC version of snow leopard had more support. it works but its so limited..pretty buggy also

Am I the only one who absolutely loved Vista? Yet at the same time I always wanted a Mac.

My first computer was an old white MacBook. I had it on Snow Leopard for the longest time and didn't upgrade but at some point I had to update to Lion for some iPod compatibility. That basically bricked it it became sooooo slow. Maybe one of the reasons why Snow Leopard is so revered is because lots of people used it as a child and have nostalgia for it. But I remember even back when I was younger ppl were always wishing Apple would release another maintanance update that just fixed bugs and made things faster. I think Snow Leopard was even advertised as having "no new features". (Only half way through the video maybe he's about to mention that)

They need to bring back spaces as it was implemented in Snow Leopard... was the best windows management feature of any OS, EVER!

Mavericks was what I used on my first Mac. I have a fondness for it.

I never owned a Mac, but I did have a Hackintosh, and it was Mavericks. Was a fun time

My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009 with Leopard and Snow Leopard was super fast and light. 10.6 was super optimized and Core 2 duo was a great CPU. Even today with OCLP this Mac can run well enough MacOs Monterrey.

10.6 was the pinnacle. For programmers there are things improved in later versions but from user point of view it's only downhill from there. Yes, there was a slowdown of the downhill at 10.9 but UX stuff broken in the previous two remained. Oh, and G5 "quad" had no problems whatsoever playing 1080p. That's just nonsense or you had a completely different one than I had 😛

Snow Leopard came along just after I switched back to a Mac after using windows since 1997. I stopped using Macs in 1997 due to the horrific build quality of Macs at that time, and for a few years I found Win 98, Windows 2000 & Windows XP to be perfectly usable on good hardware. Switching back to Mac on an Intel Mac and then getting Snow Leopard ( which I bought as an upgrade) was infinitely better than Windows Vista which was terrible. I feel the Snow Leopard era was great, we had decent upgrades in hardware and software and it was an exciting time to be a Mac enthusiast. I should add I stared using Apple with an Apple // back in the 80s.

Snow leopard was just the OS where they just had every aspect of the OS nailed and every subsequent release would add or change things that pissed me off while adding very little if anything that felt like a new "feature" and not just a dumb update to safari. Since then, they broke the green expand button, fucked with and finally trashed the skeuomorphism, changed the navigation paradigm. REMOVED many quality of life features, little nuances that made things harder working in finder. Stopped supporting openGL in favor of pushing Metal leaving a great deal of cross platform developers to jump ship because they made it way too friggin hard to port games or apps to which took all the way up to metal 3 which just barely released to even get close to DirectX in terms of viability and still lacks widespread adoption with native apple silicon support still only in beta for unreal engine, a game engine which has been around for over 15 years, and the only salve for mac owners was boot camp --an incredibly inventive and powerful feature which literally gave apple the market share they have which they have since stopped supporting. Fucked with 3rd party developers ability to easily create and implement kernel extensions or plugins, repeatedly fucked up peoples entire setups in final cut or logic pro releasing the highly controversial "X" overhauls which took years to tweak and make viable for pissed off professionals. And honestly the only thing i can really think of that felt like a revolutionary upgrade is something like sidecar. Snow leopard is just the last operating system where apple forgot the adage "don't fix what ain't broke".

Great video ! Installed Mavericks on my 2008 macPro, it's still a great OS and I personally love the UI.

Snow Leopard was for sure the best macOS :D

I was birthed into my Apple Era way back in the °I Switched° ad campaign with a dual G4 PowerMac and ;OS X 10.2.3 ‘Jaguar’. Coming from Windows and Linux I was absolutely amazed. Happy memories. I distinctly remember the excitement of 10.3 and 10.4. I can’t believe it’s almost twenty years ago now.

os x mavericks was my favourite os x release as well! It always seemed so stable, great performance and battery, and the last of the skeuomorphic os design. I used it for years on my early 2013 13” mbp and didn’t want to upgrade to the new design & many bugs

Thanks for the wallpapers!

Counter-point to the entire video and a HUGE point you left out: Snow Leopard was the first version of any Mac OS that allowed you to resize windows from ANY corner or side, and not just the bottom right corner. This had previously been a monumental time-consuming pain in the ass and a BAREBONES feature for literally EVERY other OS on the planet dating back to the DOS era. This feature, and this feature alone, turned Mac OS from a silly tech demo for children into a somewhat usable operating system for anyone wanting to migrate from Windows, where we were used to getting actual work done instead of futzing around with the OS all day. This is the one and only reason it is the most-loved OS. It was the rare instance of Apple actually listening to customers and going back on one of their headass decisions, which they never, ever do.

My personal favourite Mac OS was also Mavericks. Had it installed on my HP Hackintosh until Big Sur. Currently running Big Sur on that Hackintosh. My favourite Windows Os is tied between XP and Windows 7. My favourite OS out of All is Arch Linux.

I hope that Linux support on Apple Arm chips continues to progress. It would allow people to run a modern os long after Apple officially discontinues support.

The fact that they shitcanned PPC support so soon is a big part of why I upgraded my personal 16” to an M1 Max even though my 8C intel chip was plenty fast for my personal coding projects. I’m betting by next year or maybe 2024, no more intel support. Got out of it only paying $500 to use the machine for a couple years and I can feel confident that I’ll get the newest MacOS through 2026 at least.

Snow Leopard was my first Mac OS I used full time when I purchased my first iMac in 2009. I will say that every release since Snow Leopard has not been as stable. I never had an issue with snow leopard. No crashes, no issues. It had a great UI and had that cool intro when ya first bought the computer. I remember Mavericks causing constant issues and bugs. Saying Mavericks is better than snow leopard is subjective and your opinion, not a fact. Imo Mavericks was one of the worst Mac OS I’ve ever used

For me Mavericks takes the crown, the most beautiful dock & icons ever.

I started with Mac OS 9.2 which was incredible and I'm now on the latest Mac OS 12.6. With that said, I still believe Snow Leopard is/was the best at least for music/G4 computer to Mac Pro and though it wasn't the fastest, I would say it was the most stable. Now, you mentioned Maverick which was really fast and pretty stable. I upgraded late on this one so, I had to pay for it but, was well worth it for the Mac Pro 2009 tower. By the way, The Mac Pro 2009/2010 5.1 towers were thee best period as far as Mac hardware. Anyway, though Maverick really didn't highlight anything, and was a no thrills OS and best for the 5.1 tower, these new OS's and hardware are so powerful that it's crazy. Now, if we can get the stableness of SL or Mav in the next OS Ventura, I would be 100% happy! Great video!

I came into macs with os x leopard. I was used to linux, but wanted photoshop. Snow leopard was an optimisation on leopard and ran well, but I went on the subsequent releases and didn't think twice about it until I met several users that clinged to snow leopard like windows users to windows 7. Never know when they moved on, though. I got two mac minis now. a 2012 with user upgradeable ram and disk, and a 2020 m1 with non upgradeable anything. they look almost identical beside the light placement and the ports on the back, both has 16gb of ram but the 2012 can be upgraded to 32. The m1 has a 2tb disk, the 2012 has 512gb but can be upgraded to 4tb if I want to spend twice of what it is worth on it. progress isn't always great.

I used Snow Leopard on a gorgeous white MacBook through University years. I trusted that computer with my life.

Let's not forget Tiger, released as an update to PPc Macs in 2005, was shipped with all early Intel Macs. I purchased the first MacPro 1.1 3.0Ghz in early October 2006. Then I updated it to Leopard and subsequently to Snow Leopard which I found great: stable, fast, all the apps installed on Tiger worked, even those left only for PowerPc. Only Maverik made me feel that thrill of stability and speed again. Even now that I still have 3 MP 2.1, 3.1 and 5.1 and work steadily on an M1Max, Maverik and Snow Leopard I find them wonderfully excellent. If you then upgrade the RAM to 8Gb and a nice SSD, then you'll fly with these machines. Apple forces its users to update simply by removing app support... for no real reason; see 32bit apps or OpenGL support, minimalist single color icons 🤬. It puts a lot of useless things into the current OS, while it would be sufficient to allow the use of old apps.

I used Snow Leopard from 2008 to 2020. No kidding, 2020. That's because I kept upgrading my Macbook white 2008 with more RAM and storage. I loved Snow Leopard because it was fast, reliable and extremely stable. I tried Lion, 10.7 (the latest OS supported by the Macbook) in 2010 for a few months, but it was buggy and much slower. I switched back to 10.6 and stack to it for the next 10 years.

I've BEEEN saying this, Mavericks was amazing!

I remember people reviewing Snow Leopard when it came out, they were pissed they had to pay anything for it because it felt like a Leopard Service Pack and Apple gave out previous versions of Mac OSX for free and I don't recall which one, I'm assuming Mac OS 10.1 or 10.2 because OSX had a rocky start.

Amazing video... Mavericks was such a good OS and - in my opinion - really helped start the transition into the modern Mac era!

This is great! Exactly the kind of content that I love to see. Could you make a followup video where you rank every version of macOS (10.0 to 13)? I would watch that over and over

Tiger and Snow Leopard were absolutely fantastic, I can't speak for Mavericks because I went directly from Snow Leopard to Yosemite, and after Yosemite, I was so sick of the ongoing direction of OS X that I switched to Windows. I still love my old Macs though.

I loved those candy bar icons in OSX the aqua look was their best IMHO...

Also one thing I think you missed is that Mac sales went up drastically during the 08-11 period. Many people either upgraded from Leopard, or jumped in with SL, and the update to Lion probably left a lot of people wanting. Too this day, any questionable OS update, I call a Lion (looking at Ventura here). I skipped 10.7 entirely, and when I got to 10.8, I added in a lot of the things that Apple got rid of; grid spaces, growler (notifications didn't work for me). Pretty sure I managed to disable full screen apps as well. I was still bothered by it though, and ended up skipping everything to High Sierra (which is the last one that ran on my MBP), out of sheer spite for the continuing iOSifcation and locking down Apple seemed to be doing.

To be honest, I used it for a long time and I never had a single problem with it. It didn't crash, lock up, cause problems with my hardware, and it was fast. I had Lion on a macbook and hated it because it was so buggy. I hated it so much that I created a hackintosh on my PC with Snow Leopard.

I remember not being able to sleep because I was too excited to install Mavericks on VMWare... Good days!

10.6 felt great because 10.5 was sooooo sloowwww, but they pale in comparisson to 10.4 which in my opinion is the greatest OS X to ever ship

Not a popular opinion but 10.8 Mountain Lion was (and still kinda is) my favorite OS of all time. It was rock solid yet super beautiful with that frosty glass dock and premium textures. I know I'm the only one left on this planet who thinks Apple's skeuomorphic design was super beautiful. Mavericks was totally meh on my 2010 iMac, it was feeling totally half-baked which made me downgrade to Mountain Lion, twice. However, those structural advancements are respected.

One of the visiting speakers to my camera club, couldn’t run her Keynote presentation on the club’s MacBook Pro using OS X Yosemite. The only answer I could find was to upgrade to 12 Monterey.

lion and snow leopard were essentially tied is what the article actually said. I’ve read user reports of some lion versions being slower than snow leopard.

First of all, excellent and thought provoking video. Personally, I don't think about the "best version of Mac OS, but rather, my "favorite" version. My favorites, from top to bottom, are. Leopard, Mac OS 9, Big Sur, High Sierra, and El Capitan. I appreciated your shout-out to Leopard as the first modern Mac OS. I have often said the same thing. I too used Panther as my first full time Mac OS. I was very happy with it, and saw no real reason to pay the $120 for Tiger. When Leopard came out, I definitely did. Time Machine, Spaces, and so much more, how could I pass it? I never used Mac OS 9 in it's heyday, but I gained an appreciation fo rit using Classic on Panther. I picked up an older machine that would run it natively, and I loved it. It was light, fast, and did what it did very, very well. In today's world it is very limited, but it can still run those old games really well, and I use it frequently for just that. Big Sur was a very solid release when Apple really needed one. It prepared the way for Apple Silicon Macs, and still ran very well on Intel machines. I loved the nature dynamic wallpaper, as well. I have upgraded to Monterey, since eventually, we all have to, but I do miss Big Sur. High Sierra was the version I most anticipated. It is the one that caused me to jump on the beta channel, to see where it was going. The actual changes were not all that obvious, but APFS was huge, and the tighter integration of the "Apple Ecosystem" was very important. El Cap is a very solid release. It is about as far back as you can go, run it today, and not feel like you are missing out on modern computing. Use an up to date browser and emsil client, and you really can use this OS today, very easily. Clearly, if you were to pick the "best OS on this list, it would have to be Big Sur. However, my "favorite" is Leopard. If, somehow, it could be made to function within the ecosystem, I would be very happy using it regularly.

I think 10.6 and 10.14 are the best Mac OS X versions, so both of them are installed on my MacBook Air. 10.14 is for compatibility with the modern applications (btw it is the last macOS with the minimum 2 gb of ram requirement). But when I want to last on battery as long as possible, I boot into 10.6, which is super optimised and extremely fast (it takes less then 5 seconds to fully boot to the desktop from the moment when power button is pressed!) 10.6 is on top because it reminds how good macOS can be: super fast, super energy-efficient, super stable and very beautiful! So it holds special place as the best Mac OS X version in my opinion. 2nd place is taken by 10.14, 3rd by 10.11.

Loved the video. Sorry I saw it a year after you posted it. I am that mac guy that bought Soundjam MP when it was released. Payed $600 for a SCSI CD burner and had a laser printer having bands come to my place and mixing ProTools then burning CD's for them at on the average 2x speed!! and printing CD sleeve artwork then converting them to mp3's as a bonus! - yeah man! Then waited almost a year for the release of OSX and preordered it. It was a toy and was really just good for playing around with what the future might look like, but hung onto OS 9 until Tiger. Tiger was great - skipped Leopard completely and it wasn't until I bought a used unibody Macbook Pro that I had to purchase Snow Leopard- Tiger was no longer supported. Then again skipped Lion, Mountain Lion because they dropped Rosetta and many of the "wash dry and fold" programs that I used were not supported. I Still have and use a Mac Pro 5,1 and yes I do run Snow Leopard on it as well as Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave. This week I'm going to make that leap beyond the Monterey threshold and probably install Sonoma because Midjourney announced that it will no longer support Mojave. I subscribed to your channel and will be probably be looking for help. Glad your out there doing your thing!

Incredible Video Greg, nice work!

I would agree with you that Mavericks was arguably the best OS X release ever (in itself being another Snow Leopard type of upgrade over Mountain Lion), but Snow Leopard was just a special release as it came on a time where the Mac was still Apple’s main focus (they were trying to gain marketplace at that point and acquire those iPod and iPhone users that did not have a Mac yet), in addition, the OS was light years away in features, stability and most of all user experience from what Windows was doing at the time and it was not even close, people were switching to the Mac platform in record numbers and for sure it didn’t hurt that Steve was still alive and at the helm of Apple, I was one of those sorry Windows XP/7 users at that time since I couldn’t afford a MacBook being a high school student but always salivated at just how pretty and user friendly Apple’s hardware and software was.

S L is my all time favorite! I can’t tell you how much I miss it!

Flat-out... YES ! I have been with apple since OS 8 and I loved 9.2.2. And from all versions I have used and worked with, [10.6.8.] was stable, intuitive, consistent in its UI UX and stability. It was work-horse I could read and write with. For simple tasks, for professional tasks. I am longing back for these days. In the wobbly times of OSX I always used Fedora on the side. Now 23 years later I am stuck with a Macbook Pro that I am happy with, except for the long string of flawed operating systems. As of today, I am installing Fedora again and saying goodbye to MacOS. MacOS has become a common luxury item catered to the people who boy apple to be seen with and just send e-mail with and make instagram posts, nog for demanding professionals who use it as a heavy duty tool. Apple should introduce a -professional mode, where it's OS is stripped to strictly running software and managing files.

ive installed snow leopard on a 13 inch mid 2012 MacBook Pro and late 2012 Mac mini using a modified mach_kernel

Mavericks forever.. totally agree.. i have the wave as a wallpaper still today

I found a MBA on snow lepoard from 2012, that thing was amazing. also that game center app is so nostalgic

8:18 Ahhhhh.....that A1181 blackbook was lit

great video, though i don't even use macOS much. also i do find it funny that the benchmark you used to show windows was faster had linux in a major lead (an almost 50% win rate is not too shabby for an OS with 1-3% of the users and a distro not optimized for best performance).

I worked daily with all mac os since classic os 7 and none of them was light, fast, stable, simple and without useless sh*t like Snow Leopard. Miss it very much.

To me, Mojave is peak macOS. I only started using it with 10.12, so I never got the chance to experience Mavericks, SL, etc, and while 10.11-10.14 didn't bring any major changes, it was wholly improvement, which can't be said about the later OSes, stability really took a drop with Catalina, and I don't think it's still recovered. Big Sur was fine, Monterey was fine on x86, but brought issues on M1 (like disabling booting from external media, which was completely fine on Big Sur). Honestly, Ventura 13 is one of the worst releases in recent history, with the new System Settings app, policy changes that required Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox & friends to make their apps completely unusable & stability issues (which could probably be blamed with my switch to M1 (and all the USB/TB related stability issues that come with it), from a Hackintosh)

I loved Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard 🐆! It had some bugs (especially one where it erases stuff from your hard drive). But once the point updates came through the OS was stout, fast, intuitive, & extremely stable. Also, it had all the features of Leopard 10.5 but refined them perfectly.

Mavericks undoubtably had the best default wallpaper for any OS ever

I kept Mac OS X Mavericks for a very long time. Until the end of 2018. Then I tried El Capitan for a while and then left Mac completely and switched to Linux. I still love to play with my grey G3 with Sonnet G4 and enjoy Mac OS 9 and Tiger. Now I occasionally use Macs on Hackintoshes when I need Adobe products, but only because it's still 10% better than Windows. For me, Apple ended when they started focusing on merging iOS and Mac OS X.

I appreciate your perspective and will not argue with the notion that Mavericks was a great release, but for Apple hardware of a certain vintage and spec, Snow Leopard delivers a subjective experience that I can’t get with any other release. Boot times-even on spinning rust-rival SSD boots of modern OSes. The number of running background services (out of the box) fits in a single window, no scrolling. The drain on resources doesn’t require the admitted innovation Mavericks brought to the table, because it was a significantly lighter OS to begin with. That’s not to say it’s feature superior, it’s not, and I agree that what we’re all saying is we want a more Mac-centric Apple, but I just wanted to offer my perspective as to why I have such a fondness for Snow Leopard all these later. Owning three machines Snow Leopard-based machines that all still function quite well, it’s just unbeatable for my specific use case. I will have to give Mavericks another test run on my SSD equipped machines. Thank you for your work!

Mavericks was also my favorite Os. It was a truly glorious time.

Well made video sir!

When I was a 10 year old boy In 2011 my family’s first MacBook Pro was the mid 2010 one and it came with snow leopard I remember it so vividly. The intro video was so cool. Amazing OS. Miss it.

I am running Monterey on an Alienware Area 51m Laptop and with a desktop CPU and replaceable GPU. I like the ability to swap components, hence why i built this hackintosh than purchasing the M1

10.6 was the best version of OSX *server* - in 10.7 they decided to simplify the server app by removing all the features that the average user didn't need. At the same time, they also abandoned the XServe form factor and of all things pushed the Mac Mini as their new 'server' form factor.