We were talking about animals and my buddy said that Mac OS X releases weren’t all named after cats. I think he’s wrong. Got the scoop for us?
Well, I’m afraid your buddy is correct that not every release of Mac OS X has been named after a cat. Heck, the very latest version is Sierra.
Apple ran out of animal names at some point (actually the introduction of 10.9) and switched to famous spots in California. Not unreasonable since Apple is a California-based company.
But even before that, the very first beta version of Mac OS X (back when most people were using MacOS 9 and had no idea what true multitasking was) had the codename “Kodiak”.
Do some homework and Kodiak is a city in Alaska and the name of a type of bear both. Not a member of the feline family at all!
The first official release of Mac OS X, 10.0, was known as Cheetah, and came out in March of 2001. Six months later Apple released Puma (10.1) which added lots of missing features from the first OS X release, notably including DVD playback support.
Then systems were released approximately annually: Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, the weirdly incremental Snow Leopard (now we’re at August 2009), Lion and Mountain Lion. The latter was released in July, 2012 and was the last animal named release of Mac OS X.
In 2013 Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.9 “Mavericks”, which was the first Mac operating system to support 64-bit Intel processors. Mavericks is also a famous surfing beach in Northern California, not far from the Cupertino headquarters of the company.
Here’s a handy visualization of the different releases on a timeline from Wikipedia:
Since the release of Mavericks, the company has focused on California landmarks and locations, releasing Yosemite in October, 2014, El Capitan on September, 2015 and most recently Sierra (Mac OS X 10.12), which was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference a few months ago and is in late beta testing prior to being released generally later this year.
After Sierra? Who knows. Maybe Zuma, or Malibu, or Hollywood, or even Shasta. We’ll have to see!