[Partial]

Originally Posted by Chinney In my opinion Snow Leopard has been the best version of OS X to date. I am still waiting for an improvement on it.

I can't really argue with that. Since SL, nothing has been added to the fold that I find particularly useful. I've been using Macs since Panther, though, so I'm old school.

[PB PM]

Originally Posted by Partial I can't really argue with that. Since SL, nothing has been added to the fold that I find particularly useful. I've been using Macs since Panther, though, so I'm old school.

Old school??? I've been using Mac OS since version 4 or 5. Before that we used pre "Mac OS" Apple operating systems.

As to which version of OSX is the best? Stability wise? Tiger was the first that didn't require weekly rebooting. From there on, things have changed, but Apple has not made any earth shattering changes that haven't been "under the hood."

[Dorian Gray]

I’ve used all versions of Mac OS X (and now OS X) since 10.2 Jaguar, and the ones that stick out as the most refined are 10.4 Tiger and 10.6 Snow Leopard. However, I still think the current 10.8 Mountain Lion is the best, and not far behind Snow Leopard in terms of refinement. I wouldn’t want to go back to Snow Leopard. The previous 10.7 Lion was indeed a difficult experience, as jarring new ways of working combined with too many bugs, but it was also interesting because it showed where OS X was going in the post-PC era.

I thought I heard something about Apple moving to a yearly release cycle for OS X, which would suggest 10.9 (Lynx?) will arrive this summer.

Apple needs to make iCloud a must-have feature, and I suspect Cook is moving Apple in that direction. Most people today can’t be bothered with it, or use it accidentally to find their iPhone (or whatever). In my view iCloud, like .Mac and MobileMe before it, is too scattershot in what it does and how it does it (including random limitations and slow (and peculiar) web-browser functionality).

With the recent hacking of Evernote, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and others, the privacy and security risks of parking loads of personal information in the cloud are at the forefront of many minds. To brave those risks many people will need a super-compelling reason to actively use iCloud. It’ll come, but for now it’s missing. Maybe OS X 10.9 will add a carrot or two.

[zippy]

My 2006 iMac is 'dead-ended' at Lion, but I have to say that I think Lion is better now than when it was first rolled out. I wish I could go to Mountain Lion, as I suspect it is a little less resource intensive, but I do not find anything unstable, or unusable about Lion. And that's on a 2.16 Ghz, Core 2 Duo machine with a max of 3 GB RAM.