If you wanted to make the case that 10.6.8 is a better experience out of the box, I might agree. Launchpad is terrible, hiding the Library folder is stupid, and having the Dashboard appear as a space defeats the purpose of the Dashboard. 10.7 - 10.9 has a more refined look, without going completely flat. I do prefer Leopard's greater contrast in some places, but in others it has a tendency to look alternately garish or plain.

ICloud isn't great, but it's a heck of a lot better than MobileMe, which never worked.ĭesign-wise, (Snow) Leopard's Dock wastes space, with too much empty area below the icons and an overly-wide separator. Snow Leopard's iteration of Mail has a weird above-below layout that provides too little vertical space for reading messages: (This layout was common in many Mac apps at the time, for some reason.)

There were multiple times in High School when I lost many hours of work on my Snow Leopard machine, because when I get 'in the zone' of writing, I stop remembering to hit cmd+S. In a VM using both side-by-side, 10.9.5 feels snappier, both in general and under resource-constrained scenarios, because in the latter case Mavericks uses memory compression.

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