“Steve Jobs launched the initial 10.0 version of Mac OS X in March 2001, describing it as a platform Apple would use over the next fifteen years, or roughly the same period of time the ‘classic Mac OS’ had been used to power the Macintosh at the time,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider. “When he said that, Jobs also likely had in mind that NeXT, which built the operating system that Mac OS X was built on, was itself 15 years old in 2001 (having existed since his departure from Apple in 1986).”
“While the user interface of Mac OS X Lion (and its iOS sibling) continues to drift toward simplicity, its underpinnings are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with support for new code parallelism, managed by Grand Central Dispatch, to take advantage of multiple cores and new types of processor cores, as well as newer storage technologies (such as SSD) which require new ways of working with data to fully optimize their advantages,” Dilger reports. “At the same time, Apple has finally gotten to the point where it can put down a series of outdated APIs (notably Carbon, the procedural development tools inherited from the classic Mac OS) and focus exclusively on modern 64-bit Cocoa, just as iOS devices have.”
Dilger reports, “Although Apple began the last decade by branching out into general purpose devices with the then new iPod (something that subsequently quickly overtook the Mac in sales volumes), it closed the decade with the vast majority of its unit sales (including half of its iPods) being driven by iOS, the mobile edition of Mac OS X.”
Much more in the full article here.