It was two decades ago – March 24, 2001 – that Mac OS X was first made available to users worldwide. We don’t always like empty sentimentality here in Ars, but the milestone seemed worth a quick note.
Of course, Mac OS X (or macOS 10, as it was later known) does not quite survive your 20th birthday; Last year’s macOS Big Sur update increased the version number to 11, ending X’s reign.
But despite its dual life on x86 and ARM processors and its increasingly close ties to iOS and iPadOS, today’s macOS is still a direct descendant of the original Mac OS X release. Mac OS X, in turn , evolved in part from Steve Jobs ‘NeXT operating system – which had recently been acquired by Apple – and its launch was a harbinger of Jobs’ second era at Apple.
Cheetah, the initial release of Mac OS X, had many bugs. But he introduced a number of things that are still present in the operating system today. This includes the dock, which – despite some refinements and added features – is still fundamentally the same now, as is the modern version of the Finder. And although macOS has seen a number of interface and design tweaks that have changed over time, the footprints of Cheetah’s Aqua interface can still be found in Big Sur.
OS X also brought many new features and technologies that we now consider to be guaranteed. For example, it allowed Apple laptops to wake up immediately and introduced dynamic memory management, among other things.
In retrospect, the biggest impact of Mac OS X may lie in the role it played in inspiring and supporting iOS, which has far surpassed macOS as Apple’s most widely used operating system. And, in fact, macOS lives in a very different context today than it did in 2001. It was recently pulled from point 2 of the operating system globally by Google’s Chrome OS, ending a long run for Mac OS as the second most The world’s popular desktop operating system in terms of units shipped.
The most popular desktop operating system in 2021 is Windows, as it was in 2001, but the most popular operating system in general is Google’s Android, which has a dramatically greater market share in the mobile space than iOS.
Therefore, although the influence of Mac OS X is profound, it exists today mainly as a support for iOS, which is also not the most popular operating system in its category. Despite Apple’s resounding success in the second Steve Jobs era, as well as the recent Tim Cook era, the Mac is still a relatively niche platform – loved by some but ignored by much of the mainstream.
After 20 years, a lot has changed, but a lot has remained the same.