“Older readers might still remember when Macs made the transition to OS X, more recently rebranded to macOS,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac. “But if you still kind of think of that as the ‘new’ OS, as of today it’s actually now been around for longer than all the preceding versions – collectively and colloquially known as Classic Mac OS.”
“Jason Snell marked the occasion in a blog post yesterday. ‘Today marks 17 years, one month, and 29 days since Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001. That’s a strangely odd number—6,269 days—but it also happens to be the exact length of time between January 24, 1984 (the launch of the original Macintosh) and March 24, 2001. In other words, today the Mac’s second operating system era, powered by Mac OS X (now macOS) has been in existence as long as the first era was,'” Lovejoy reports.
“As to the future, Snell says that he doesn’t see a ‘seismic’ shift any time soon, more a gradual increase in the borrowing from iOS,” Lovejoy reports. “But he does acknowledge that a new chip could see the process happen all over again.”
Read more in the full article here.
“It’s a milestone,” Jason Snell writes for Six Colors. “Apple makes Mac chip transitions every dozen years or so, and another one may be on the way. All of this has happened before, and all of this will probably happen again.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Those of us who’ve been here since the beginning (starting on Apple IIe units, pre-Macintosh) can only say, “Wow! What a long, wonderful, and sometimes harrowing trip it’s been!”
I am older than both together.
Yea? Well I’m as old as the RCA Model 501.
And I used Apple II’s to typeset for my college newspaper, and had the original Mac 128 . . . I also loved Tang! 🙂
The only Apple OSX on Macbooks i have experienced is Mountain Lion and Mavericks. ML was the best, i wish i still had it, especially when i upgraded to 16GB Ram and SSD in 2015. I hear good things about Snow Leppard, would love love to experience that OSX
Another interesting study would be how long Classic was a free upgrade compared to how long OS X/MacOS has been. When I owned my original SE, all you had to do was take a disk to Computerland, and they’d load the most recent versions of System and Finder. That lasted until OS 7. Then OS X was introduced. I don’t remember when Apple stopped charging for that upgrade. It would be interesting to see the timelines.
System 7.5.5 was the last free upgrade. A very buggy version. Then Steve Jobs came back and Apple (not sure now much help they got from NeXT people) came out with System 7.6. That brought stability to System 7 but Steve charged for it as Apple needed cash to keep running. Then OS 8 and OS 9 came out (also paid upgrades, but worth it) while NeXT OS was being converted and given a massive upgrade for Apple.
I remember the days when a Mac OS upgrade consisted of what seemed like a dozen 3.5″ floppy disks in a multi-pocket plastic sheet to keep them all in the right order.
However that was the advanced stuff. My earlier computers used 5 1/4″floppy disks which were really floppy, and they were a great advantage over my earlier computers which used audio cassettes, which in turn seemed highly advanced compared to my first home built computer which had to be programmed using 8 switches for the data and 8 switches for the address with another switch to write that data – yes a massive 256 bytes of data!
Note: I was born a few months before DDE was sworn in for a second term. My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I switched to Mac SE from a Commodore 128.
Old enough to remember getting the Public Beta and loading it up on a 400 MHz G3 Blue iMac. It was rough but it showed me Apple’s future and started my on buying Apple shares back when they were cheap- by today’s price a steal.
The stock split 2-1 @ $90 and then later 7-1. 1 share bought back then is 14 now- not counting the re-investment of dividends.
Back then it looked like this: