[gilgoomesh]

Snow Leopard was macOS moving so slowly people thought Apple were abandoning the Mac.

Apple changed how they tied OS updates to hardware sales in this era and this left a lot of Macs on Snow Leopard for half a decade. So people remember that last point update – which was as close to a low-term-stability release as Apple has ever had.

But to get there, Snow Leopard received 15 updates over 2 years and it was really just point updates to Leopard so it was more like 29 updates over 4 years without a major user facing feature. And this was after Leopard itself took over 2 years to develop.

If Apple did nothing but polish features and reduce bugs for 6 years, people would proclaim them dead. And they might actually be dead since their entire sales model is tied to cycles of development, promotion and delivery. For those of us who remember Apple getting stuck on System 7 between 1990 and 1997 and how the company nearly collapsed in that era: it would be a delay almost on that scale.

[mrpippy]

It didn’t have anything to do with Sarbanes-Oxley (that was iPhone/iPod touch updates), Apple just charged for OS updates back then.

Snow Leopard was notably cheaper than Leopard ($30 vs $130), Lion was $30 on the App Store, Mountain Lion was $20, then Mavericks and everything after have been free.

Snow Leopard did have a long life though, it was the last OS that could run PowerPC apps, also the last to run on the original 32-bit Core Duo Intel Macs.

[jjcob]

Snow Leopard introduced GCD, which was a HUGE new feature. It completely changed how we wrote async code. It just wasn't a huge user facing feature.

Snow Leopard also introduced the Mac App Store (in a point release), which was a user facing feature.

I think the "zero new features" mostly meant "no flashy user facing features". It had a lot of new features for developers.