What? App nap was added many releases after Snow Leopard.

Edit: 3 releases actually. (Mavericks)

Sorry, I meant memory compression.

Memory compression is just awesome.

Memory compression was also added in Mavericks.

Then... what was it that dramatically increased my battery life from Leopard to Snow Leopard?

(I might be misremembering everything.)

OSX is still pretty great. After Snow Leopard, for a while it looked like OSX is gonna turn into "iOS Desktop Edition", starting with Lion. But that never really happened, Sierra is a very nice OS, and High Sierra is basically the same thing with the OS using Metal.

(Now if only Apple would sell a Macbook or iMac with 512 SSD & 16 GB RAM for a reasonable price)

App nap is really great, I agree. But you know you can still run Snow Leopard, right? You could get an older pre-retina MBP for like $400 to run it at about the same speed as a Chromebook will run ChromeOS.

Much less secure though.