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Mac OS 9 Apple didn’t start calling it macOS until years after iOS was a thing and iOS was called OS X and iPhone OS first.
by mattl 4y ago
Mac OS 9
Apple didn’t start calling it macOS until years after iOS was a thing and iOS was called OS X and iPhone OS first.
- shawnbaden 4y agohttps://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/mac-os-x
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoActually, OS X was short for Mac OS X, where "X" was the roman numeral "10". In a way, the name never changed.
- mattl 4y agoUm actually, OS X was a distinct branding from Mac OS X.
- TwiceCubed 4y agoYou're confidently incorrect. If you weren't paying attention at the time, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article. This isn't hard to check. "OS X" was the official name for five years, from 2011-2016. It wasn't short for anything. The "Mac" prefix had been officially removed from it for that time. This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoI disagree with Wikipedia's framing. There wasn't some sort of major rebrand in 2011, Apple just stopped writing "Mac" at the start of the name. Old-timers knew what it stood for. It's like how "Mac" is still short for "Macintosh", even though Apple basically never uses the full name anymore.
- TwiceCubed 4y agoThey didn't "just stop writing it" in some contexts. They started registering trademarks that explicitly didn't include it, and then they went back. The trademark for "OS X" on its own was approved in November 2011, and then Apple started using it on its own. Their other trademark registrations (e.g. USPTO TM SN 86097345 OS X Mavericks) continued in that form, until their registration for "macOS" was approved and they changed back (e.g. USPTO TM SN 87534929 macOS High Sierra). You can have your etymology and your opinion, but as far as Apple and the government are concerned, the fact is that the official name was just "OS X". Wikipedia is correct, and this was also the understanding among Apple fans at the time.
- metadat 4y agoThanks for the correction. Deleted.
- hedgehog 4y agoYour memory is incorrect. The branding sequence was System (from before I remember up to 7.5) -> Mac OS (7.6 to 9) -> Mac OS X (10.0 to ??) -> OS X (??) -> macOS (starting after 2015). Edit: Sibling comment from htimsenyawed looks right to me.
- htimsenyawed 4y agomacOS was originally Mac OS X and short referenced as OS X. The official name change from Mac OS X to macOS began with release 10.12 Sierra, the previous version was called Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The transition to macOS from Mac OS X occurred in 2016 as that was the year that Sierra was announced and released.
- Nition 4y agoI’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as OS X, is in fact, Mac OS X, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, macOS.
- panzi 4y agoAlso, and I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, I think during "Mac OS X" times they said it is pronounced as "mac OS ten", because X is the roman numeral for 10. Wikipedia has references about it where Apple themselves even back then used either pronunciation, though. Also a reference that says while it stands for 10 it also references the X commonly found in many Unix things because of the Unix roots of Mac OS X.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ahoya 4y agoA rare inverted confidentally incorrect, when someone claims (incorrectly and with great confidence) that someone else is confidently incorrect.
- timeon 4y ago> This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up. This is like telling someone who is called Louis that his actual name is Hlodowig.
- arp242 4y agoIt was released as "Mac OS X", and then later shortened/rebranded to just "OS X". Unless you want to argue that the etymology of "OS X" is completely unrelated to "Mac OS X" and is merely coincidentally very similar, the statement "OS X was short for Mac OS X" is correct by all but the most pedantic definition.
- TwiceCubed 4y ago[dead]
- asveikau 4y agoI think they didn't start calling it Mac OS until 7.5 or so. Before that it was "system 7", "system 6", etc.
- chongli 4y agoHere’s the startup screen from MacOS 8 [1] which came out in 1997, more than a decade before the iPhone came out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_os_8_splash_screen.pn...