Since its release in 2009, it’s been a continuing fallacy for pundits to hold up Mac OS X Snow Leopard as the perfect example of how Apple should update the Mac.

It’s a funny world where Apple is often criticized for not bringing new features to the Mac, yet it’s also regularly praised for how Snow Leopard allegedly brought nothing new. Snow Leopard continues to be this shining example of how Apple ought to ignore the pressures to update macOS every single year.

The latest claim is that iOS 27 will at last be one of these Snow Leopard updates, with no new features. It will make the existing features better, perhaps faster, certainly more stable.

If you want to argue that Apple cannot keep up its annual schedule of updating every OS, you go right ahead because you’ve got a point. But it’s only since 2012, two years after Snow Leopard, that there have been annual updates.

So for instance, Snow Leopard may have gotten a prime 33-minute slot in WWDC 2009, but OS X barely got any mention in 2010. Or indeed in the year before Snow Leopard, 2008.

If you need to point to Apple slowing things up in order to stabilise and improve, the years to talk about are 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. That’s when Apple truly added nothing but point releases with improvements.

Or you could really mess with the heads of people who say simultaneously that Apple needs to pause, and that Apple is behind on Artificial Intelligence. During the Snow Leopard launch, Bertrand Serlet— Apple’s then senior vice president of software engineering — mentioned how the company had improved a key feature.

From OS X Leopard on, you could select text in a PDF and copy it out. But if the text was in columns, for instance, what you got was run-together text.

Installing OS X Snow Leopard — image credit: Apple

"It doesn’t always follow the logical order of the text," said Serlet. "In Snow Leopard, we’ve used a little bit of AI to actually infer the structure of the document."

There you go. AI in the Mac operating system, 16 years ago. And in Snow Leopard, the OS X that allegedly brought us nothing new.

What Snow Leopard really brought us

Maybe Serlet erred when he set out what Snow Leopard was introducing, because he did begin with "first, lots of refinements across the board." Specifically, he claimed that OS X was comprised of what he described as being "over a thousand projects," and 90% were being refined.

He also said that "we actually love the way the Finder is in Leopard," and that consequently Apple "did not change it — at least [not] the user interface."

What Snow Leopard got was a Finder that had been rewritten using then-modern Apple tools, specifically "so that we are better positioned for the future." Serlet didn’t mention it then, but it would be a later point update to OS X Snow Leopard that added the App Store.

The Dock was also revised, so that clicking and holding on any app’s icon would launch an Expose-like display of all of its open windows.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s wallpaper — image credit: 512pixels

Or you could now drag a file from anywhere, right onto an app icon on the Dock. That would preview all of the app’s open windows, and you could drop the file onto any of them.

Then there was one specific addition to OS X which today seems obvious, but only because we’ve had all of these years to get used to it. Mac OS X Snow Leopard introduced Exchange support.

So from this point on, you could connect Apple Mail, iCal, or your Address Book, to a company Microsoft Exchange server. Suddenly using company email was the same as using your own.

And now you didn’t have to have separate work and home calendars to check, you could see all of your commitments in one place.

Visible and invisible features

That Exchange support was so immediately good and so spectacularly easy to set up, that if you needed it, you used it and never thought about what it was like before.

Another Snow Leopard wallpaper. Image credit: Basic Apple Guy

Back then, this was a sufficiently big deal that Craig Federighi was brought on stage to demonstrate it.

It’s true, though, that if you didn’t need Exchange support then, you had no reason to be thrilled. And if you’ve needed it since, it’s just always worked, so arguably it’s never looked like the big deal it was.

Similarly, the Mac had long had its QuickTime Player, and it does to this day, so it wasn’t entirely new in 2009. Except it was — Apple had reworked it, and it was now faster, it introduced HTTP streaming, and it was also visibly better.

For 2009’s new QuickTime Player 10 brought in redesigned playback controls, which faded away as you watched a video. Yet again, that just seems right today, but note that after 16 years, Apple has only updated QuickTime Player to version 10.5.

What Snow Leopard introduced in 2009 was technology that would continue to serve us this far into the future.

In the same way, Snow Leopard introduced new ways of handling processor power so that Mail, for instance, simply ran faster.

Apple launched the open-source OpenCL which let developers use faster multicore graphics without having to know "exactly what [graphics] cards the user has."

From Snow Leopard, OS X was fully a 64-bit operating system. All of Apple’s own apps were rewritten to be 64-bit ones. Serletsaid that Snow Leopard was the final stage in Apple’s move to 64-bit.

"Of course, the primary reason to use 64-bit is to take advantage of lots of memory," he said, because 32-bit apps are limited to 4GB. "When you run in 64-bit, [the limit is] 16 billion gigabytes."

Safari 4

It’s always hard to convey what an improvement such as moving to the faster math of 64-bit processing really feels like. So to explain why its new Safari 4 was such a big deal, Apple created a new unit of description.

That unit was the Microsoft Internet Explorer unit. With IE as one, Apple showed a chart listing Firefox 3 as being as fast as 1.7 IEs.

Chrome 2 was 5.4 IEs.

And Safari 4 was 7.8 IEs.

Safari 4 was also home to a brand-new feature called Top Sites. With a single click, you could see a "panoramic" view of the sites you visited most often, and could see immediately which had been updated.

Safari 4 introduced "Top Sites"

Top Sites came in with Safari 4 in OS X Snow Leopard, and lasted until macOS Big Sur in 2020. It was the forerunner of today’s Start Page.

So a 2009 OS X update that brought us nothing actually brought us something new we’re still using today. It brought us Exchange support, helping the Mac in business, and it paved the way for new and faster technologies.

The release before, OS X Leopard in 2007, introduced Time Machine and Spaces — both of which you should be using but still aren’t — plus Boot Camp for Windows. The release after, OS X Lion in 2011, brought in Mission Control and Launchpad.

In terms of in-your-face changes to the Mac, Leopard and Lion arguably did more. But Snow Leopard was never the empty tune-up release it is continually described as.

Maybe people just believed John Hodgman, who introduced 2009’s WWDC in his "I’m a PC" character and tried to encourage developers to leave early, or help out Microsoft Vista.

"Hello, I’m a PC, welcome to the 2009 Worldwide Developers Conference," he said in an opening video. "I want to be the first to wish you all a week with some innovation, but not too much, please."