It's hard to believe that Mac OS X macOS is two decades old, but it's true. On March 24, 2001, Apple released the first non-beta version of Mac OS X 10.0:
Today marks the 20th anniversary of Mac OS X, the Mac operating system that changed everything. Arriving only a couple years after the first iMac, it helped forge Apple's image as the king of cool — and changed computing forever. At the turn of the millennium, Apple was the talk of the tech world. Reorder widgets: Click Notification Centre's icon and then Today. The default view has some of.
The release followed years of development that took NeXT's technology and molded it into an operating system for the Mac. That process took longer than Apple had predicted, and included a false start known as Rhapsody. That's really a story for a different time, but in short, that operating system strategy left classic Mac OS developers without a way forward for their applications that didn't require rewriting them, and the community soundly rejected the entire thing.
Caturday Is Today Mac Os X
After a regroup, OS X began to take shape, with a new technology named Carbon that would allow apps written for the Mac to run natively on the new operating system with some tweaks. I truly believe Carbon is the real hero of the OS X transition, as without it, I don't think it would have been successful.1
However, Aqua grabbed all the attention. First introduced in Developer Preview 3, this new user interface was shockingly different from Platinum in Mac OS. Full of pinstripes and bright blue elements, Aqua was designed to be as friendly and fun as the colorful iMac G3s with which many users would first experience it.
All of that eye candy came at a cost, though. Performance in the early versions of Mac OS X was notoriously bad as the hardware caught up. By the time most users were ready to switch from Mac OS 8 or 9, OS X was in pretty decent shape.
If you want to learn more about Mac OS X, I've rounded up some links for you:
- Aqua and Bondi: My book on the creation of Mac OS X and the evolution of the iMac G3.
- On this week's MPU, David and I talked about the entire two decade history of our beloved macOS.
- Mac OS X 10.0's entry in my macOS Screenshot Library
- A Wayback Machine grab of the original OS X website.
- John Siracusa's review of Mac OS X 10.0.
- Andrew Gore's take on OS X for Macworld in June of 2001. (Start on page 9.)
- John Gruber's look at Avie Tevanian's role in the creation of OS X.
- An article from Benj Edwards on OS X's origins, published back in 2010. It pairs nicely with this Macworld article from 2000 by Jason Snell, Stephan Somogyi and Jeff Pittelkau.
- My buddies over at Simple Beep have a great episode marking the occasion, as does John with The Talk Show.
- Both Rhapsody and Mac OS X included an environment for running Mac OS apps directly, but these 'Classic' programs wouldn't get any of the benefits promised by the new operating system, including preemptive multitasking, protected memory or an update user interface. ↩
So I went ahead and installed Mac OS Big Sur on my mid-2015, 15-inch MacBook Pro. I've been messing around with it a bit here and there and while the new UI elements taking some getting used to, it feels more stable than I thought it would. I'm also surprised at the responsiveness, this beta version is running faster than the latest production version on Mac OS Catalina.
Veins of light mac os. I've run across a couple of bugs here and there; the label for my clock widget says 'City' instead of 'Chicago' and the weather widget keeps defaulting back to Cupertino. I was able to reproduce an issue another blogger is seeing, but otherwise it's a new coat of paint on the status quo. While users will instantly notice the new look and feel, they should still feel comfortable and confident when Big Sur is realized in the Fall.
I sold the Mac Mini I was using as a 'BYOD', or 'Bring Your Own Device', machine at work. Work has completely gone down the Microsoft path and have done their best to lock non-Windows machines out of the network. While my work as a developer that uses Linux (or other Unix platforms) all day long is still entrenched in a decidedly non-Windows environment, the work desktop team feels everyone in the company should be using Windows laptops. So I make do. I can deal and it'll be nice to use the money from the sale of the Mac mini toward my next computer. I'm trying to decide if I want to try the full-time Linux leap or just embrace this aging MacBook Pro and iPad Pro combo I currently have going on.
Rabirinsu mac os. Oh well, there's no need to rush while everything is working just fine.
Caturday Is Today Mac Os Update
In the meanwhile, I'll see what other bugs in Big Sur I can find and provide feedback to Apple. If you're not filling out bug reports, you're doing the whole 'beta software' thing wrong.
