On March 24 , 2001 , the iMac was less than three years old , the iPod was still more than six month out , and Macs ply atastoundingspeeds of up to 733MHz . But most importantly , Apple on that twenty-four hour period released the first prescribed version of Mac OS X , changing the future tense of its platform everlastingly .
Though nobody roll in the hay it at the time , the discharge , codenamed Cheetah , was the first step in transforming Apple from a caller poised on the verge of cataclysm intothe second most valuable company in the public .
Were you to wage in a flight of fondness , you might call Mac OS X the rescue for the tenacious few that had held onto Apple in the dark times , through the era when the Mac product line had proliferate into a writhing , buzz mass of cryptical models in a seeming attempt to out - PC the PC Lord . Mac OS X was a augury that the direction of the company had really and truly changed , after year of failed attempts to modernize the Mac OS .
The coup of Mac OS X , more than anything else , is thatit shipped . The road to a new version of the Mac OS was litter with the unnoted Graf of projects that had die before : Taligent . Copland . Gershwin .
Despite the early liberation of a public genus Beta with its own radical changes , that first send edition of Mac OS X was far from perfect : It could n’t play DVDs or burn CDs ; execution was often torpid ; and the interface was distinctly unlike — and in many way crude — than its predecessor . But Apple does as it always does : it rolls . And over the follow years , the troupe issued update after update , both minor and major , amend the arrangement in a multitude of way while slowly succeed over converts from both the PCandthe classical Mac O .
Ten year later , Mac OS X is still by no way utter . Ask any Mac user , and I guarantee that , without wavering , they ’ll draw up a list of thing that rile them about the operating system they use every day . But were you to plat the satisfaction of most Mac users on an entirely unscientific graphical record , I’dboldlywager you ’d find it slue upward over time .
To me , there ’s no groovy will of Mac OS X ’s success than my own friends and fellowship . In the ’ XC , the majority were personal computer user and even those few that had stuck by the Mac before long move to what they saw as the greener pastures of PCs — if for no other intellect than they were far more affordable than the Macs of that long time . But now , ten old age after the release of Mac OS X , they ’re far more likely to be packing an atomic number 13 MacBook than a cheap plastic Dell . Though that might not be a exploit to place solely at the human foot of the operating organization — Apple ’s accent on ironware design , Microsoft ’s numerous missteps , and my own repeated entreaties plausibly contributed — it ’s hard to fence that Mac OS X did n’t play a major role .
Not just because it dragged Macs into the modern geological era , with long - awaited features like preemptive multitasking and protected memory , previously the knowledge domain of its competitors . After all , the vast majority of computer user probably could n’t tell you what either of those even means . No , they came to the Mac because as Apple better Mac OS X , it nonplus to an underlying doctrine : the operating organization is n’t an end unto itself ; it ’s about making it as well-off as potential to use estimator todothings .
That ’s the same ism that Apple has taken with the iPhone and the iPad , and to my mind it ’s the reason that those production have met with such overwhelming success . Frankly , it ’s hardnotto see the impact of Mac OS X on most of the major decisions Apple has made in the past decade , whether it be the importance of iTunes , the conversion to Intel processor , or the development of Io devices — which , after all , are based on the same OS X underpinnings as the Mac .
As we ship upon Mac OS X ’s second decade , the Mac ’s operating arrangement is about to undergo another major transformation , perhaps no less substantial than that from the classic Mac OS . Inthe outgoing Mac OS X Lion , the student becomes the teacher : Apple is beginning to fold feature from its iOS devices back into the Mac OS , take its background figurer software down a raw and very dissimilar path .
While those change have worried some — specially those who have long been invested in Mac OS X — progress , upright or regretful , is inevitable . The Mac OS X of ten years hence is going to be as different from today ’s Snow Leopard as Snow Leopard is from Mac OS X 10.0 , but at its core , that succeeding Mac OS X is going to be rooted in those same fundamentals of stupefy technology out of our way so we can get on with our life story .
As always , the proof will be in the using . But if I may return to my soundly unscientific divinatory graph from above , I ’d pose an guess dead reckoning that a decennary down the route , that bloodline of expiation will continue to slue upwards , and we ’ll all be look back on the Mac OS of 2011 and shake our head at what we were missing .
[ Dan Moren is a aged associate editor at Macworld , and a Mac OS X substance abuser since the year 2000 . ]
