Dates were missed, features were added and removed, but unlike all earlier efforts, this one produced a shipping product.Īnd yet the success of Mac OS X is still an open question. Advertisementĭespite the (comparatively) minor market requirements hiccup of the Rhapsody strategy, the Mac OS X project proceeded with what can only be described as single-minded determination, from its official announcement in May of 1998 to its first release in March of 2001. But the acquisition of NeXT and the second coming of Steve Jobs gave Apple one final window of opportunity.

By all rights, Copland should have been Apple's last chance. Mac users had suffered too many broken promises, and Apple had stumbled down too many blind alleys. Perhaps Windows 95 wasn't 'insanely great', but the market had declared that it was 'good enough.' Meanwhile, Microsoft quietly continued its own long-running project to radically revise its core operating system technologies: Windows NT (which eventually gave birth to Windows 2000, and soon, Windows XP).īy the time Apple's penultimate next generation OS project, Copland, was mercifully killed in 1996, the situation was dire. But as the years passed and competing operating systems evolved, both by adopting Mac-like GUIs and by advancing their core OS features, Mac users-as well as Apple itself-became skittish.īy 1995, Windows had confined Apple's OS to a small corner of the market. In the early days (the Pink project was launched in 1987), Mac users paid little attention to these efforts, confident that their current OS was the most advanced in the personal computer market. It's a tragicomic litany of code names: Pink, Taligent, Copland, Rhapsody. Apple has been trying to produce a successor to the classic Mac OS operating system for almost 15 years. To say that Mac OS X has been eagerly awaited by Mac users is an understatement.

It was preceded by many developer releases and one public beta release. Don't let the version number confuse you this is the first official release of Apple's new OS. Mac OS X was released on March 24th, 2001, with a suggested retail price of $129 and a version number of 10.0. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 'X' is pronounced 'ten', like the roman number, not 'ex' like the letter. Mac OS X is Apple's new operating system.

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