It’s been 20 years since the launch of Mac OS X

Two decades ago to the day, on March 24, 2001, Mac OS X was released to users around the world. We’re not always passionate about empty sentimentality here at Ars, but the milestone seemed worthy of a quick note.

Of course, Mac OS X (or macOS 10 as it was later called) didn’t enough survive until their 20th birthday; Last year’s macOS Big Sur update increased the version number to 11, ending X’s reign.

But despite its double life on x86 and ARM processors and its increasingly close ties to iOS and iPadOS, today’s macOS is still a direct descendant of that original version of Mac OS X. Mac OS X, at in turn, evolved in part from Steve Jobs’ NeXT operating system – which had recently been acquired by Apple – and its launch was the harbinger of the second Jobs era at Apple.

Cheetah, the initial version of Mac OS X, was pretty buggy. But it introduced a number of things that are still present in the operating system today. These included the dock, which – despite some improvements and added features – is still basically the same now as it never was, as well as the modern version of Finder. And while macOS has seen a number of UI and design changes that have changed over time, Cheetah’s highly publicized Aqua UI imprints can still be found all over Big Sur.

OS X also brought many new features and technologies that we now take for granted. For example, it allowed Apple laptops to immediately wake up from sleep mode and introduced dynamic memory management, among other things.

In retrospect, perhaps Mac OS X’s biggest impact lies in the role it played in inspiring and strengthening iOS, which far surpassed macOS as the most widely used operating system by Apple. And indeed, macOS lives today in a very different context from that of 2001. It was recently pushed out of the world’s No. 2 operating system by Google’s Chrome OS, ending a very long run for Mac OS in as the second most popular in the world. desktop operating system in terms of units shipped.

The most popular desktop operating system in 2021 is Windows, just as it was in 2001, but the most popular operating system overall is Google’s Android, which has significantly more market share. important in the mobile space than iOS.

So while the influence of Mac OS X runs deep, it exists today primarily as a support for iOS, which is also not the most popular OS in its class. Despite Apple’s resounding success in the second Steve Jobs era, as well as the recent Tim Cook era, the Mac is still a niche platform that is relatively loved by some, but ignored by much of the general public.

After 20 years, a lot has changed, but a lot has remained the same.