“Apple is running out of big cats,” Brian Caulfield reports for Forbes.
“Ten years ago, Apple introduced the first major release of its OS X operating system, Cheetah,” Caulfield reports. “Since then, all seven new versions of the operating system have been named after big cats.”
“The problem: there are only so many kinds of cats,” Caulfield reports. “Lion — which incorporates a few tricks learned from Apple’s iPad — was released in July. Apple hasn’t said anything, publicly, about the next version of its OS X operating system.”
Caulfield reports, “First they’ll have to come up with a name. That could be hard. All of the animals Apple has used come from Felidae family in the Carnivora order of mammals… There are a lot of other cats left. None of them are particularly intimidating though. The Eurasian Lynx, can weigh as much as 66 pounds. Even less fearsome: the Eurasian Lynx’s North American cousin, the bobcat; the ocelot — the biggest of the dinky Leopardus genus; and felix catus, the domestic cat. Apple hasn’t tapped a third group of Felidae, now extinct, known as the Machairodontinae.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: What’s your OS X name of choice? Take our poll in the left column of the main site.
Mac OS X versions, names/codenames, and release dates:
• Mac OS X 10.7 Lion : July 20, 2011
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: August 28, 2009
• Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: October 26, 2007
• Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger: April 29, 2005
• Mac OS X 10.3 Panther: October 24, 2003
• Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar: August 24, 2002
• Mac OS X 10.1 Puma: September 25, 2001
• Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah: March 24, 2001
• Mac OS X Public Beta: September 13, 2000.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]