Was Snow Leopard 10.6 greatest macOS release ever? An OS X essay

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard long has been held as the gold standard for OS X/macOS releases. It's not uncommon to hear people to this day laud Snow Leopard as the best version of any Apple OS. There's been a felt attempts to contextualize why Snow Leopard was so loved with solid points but they fall a bit short.
Corrections:
OS X's kernel is from Mach from NeXTSTEP, which NeXSTEP borrowed additional kernel layers and low-level user space code derived from parts of BSD .
Written version (with sources)
blog.greggant.c...
0:00 Opening
0:39 Snow Leopard: The Myth, The Legend
1:27 OS X 10.0 - 10.1 Cheetah and Puma CORRECTION based off NeXSTEP Kernel (see corrections)
2:13 OS X 10.2 Jaguar aka "Jagwire"
3:03 OS X 10.3 Panther
3:40 OS X 10.4 Tiger
4:31 OS X 10.5 Leopard
4:51 OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
9:16 Macs, iPods, iPhones, iTunes and Steve
10:10 OS X 10.7 - 10.8 - Lion and Mountain Lion
10:51: OS X 10.9 Mavericks
12:55 OS X 10.9 Mavericks Virtual Memory Compression and other tech
15:07 OS X 10.10 Yosemite
15:36 OS X/macOS 10.11 - 10.14 El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave
16:26 Windows 8 - 10
18:03 macOS 10.15 Catalina, a period of regression
19:11 A gated community: Big Sur / Monterey
20:24 The Crux
21:41 Disclaimer
21:54 Bonus Content! Upscaled Desktops!
In this video, my goal is to explain why Snow Leopard was the most loved OS X release but more importantly what version of OS X I'd argue was the high water mark for OS X ;)
This video has been a labor of love from someone who's used every version of OS X including the beta (which I bought back in the year 2000), who's somewhere between Mac aficionado and Apple skeptic, and author of a few popular online guides related Apple hardware. My first Mac of my own was a PowerMac G3 (in 1999), and since I've owned a PowerBook G3 Pismo, G4, G5, Mac Pro 2008, MacBook 2007 white, MacBook 2008 (Unibody), Mac Pro 2010, Mac Pro 2019, and an M1 Max. I also have had work provided MacBook Pros for years (2013, 2015, 2017, 2021). I even built a short lived hacktinosh. I say this not to brag but rather to say, I've experienced OS 9 and especially OS X on quite a bit of hardware.
Everything in this video is from my own lived experience, from bouncing around between esoteric web browsers in days before Safari, like Omniweb, Chimera/Camino, Mozilla, and dual booting to OS 9 to run Photoshop 5.5. OS X/macOS is the glue that keeps me bound to Apple's computers as if Apple were to magically offer macOS for any hardware, I doubt I'd ever bought another Apple desktop post 2010.... and it shouldn't be that way.
Lastly, 10.6 was a great release of OS X. Don't get it twisted.
Please share this video if you enjoyed it as it's taken far far far too much time to make.
Bonus Content!
Every OS X (macOS) 10.6 Snow Leopard Nature Desktop - in Glorious 5k Resolution
blog.greggant.c...
Every OS X Snow Leopard Abstract Desktop - in Glorious 5k and 8k Resolution
blog.greggant.c...
Links:
The Mac, The Myth, The Legend: How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability
9to5mac.com/20...
Early Benchmarks Of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion
www.phoronix.c...
Snow Leopard vs. Lion: Performance head-to-head
www.cnet.com/c...
OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review
arstechnica.co...
Future is a gated community (my reaction to the 2013 Mac Pro announcement in 2013)
blog.greggant.c...
Wanna talk retro Mac OS/OS X with a small group people? Check out The Tech Corner run by fellow KZbin creator, Quinn of Tech Corner. It's where I talk tech.
/ discord
Credit to Apple.com for certain device images. Credit to Apple for WWDC/Macworld footage.
Video/Music/Editing by me. FCPX/Motion/Pixelmator Pro/Sketch/Cubase/Ableton.
Topics covered in passing:
Mac gaming, Steve Jobs, nVidia, planned obsolescence, walled garden, future of the Mac