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March 24, 2006

Mac OS X Turns 5

Mac OS X was introduced five years ago today - March 24, 2001 - and John Siracusa over at Ars Technica has a very nice piece about it:

In five short years, Apple has essentially created an entirely new platform. Oh, I know, it's really just the foundation of NeXT combined with the wreckage of classic Mac OS, but I think that makes it even more impressive. Two failing, marginalized platforms have combined to become the platform for the alpha geeks in the new century.

Yep, five years. I was in line to buy Mac OS X when it launched (and all I got for my $129 was a slow OS and a t-shirt). The product was, to put it mildly, under-cooked; as Khan and I played with it, we both agreed that the single best thing in the OS was the "system update" utility.

And "update" Apple has, indeed. It astonishes me how far the Mac has come in the last 60 months. 10.0 came out in March, and 10.1 (a significant speed-bump) came out in August. And then the real race started: in the time since Microsoft launched Windows XP (late 2001), Apple has iterated through three significant releases of Mac OS (10.2, 10.3 and 10.4), moving its platform from the ancient, creaky Mac OS 9 architecture to the modern and sleek OS X. At the same time, Apple has added can't-live-without-'em innovations like Spotlight, Dashboard, and Expose.

So happy birthday, OS X. I can't wait to see what you'll do next.

(Now for the interesting question: will Leopard beat Vista out the door?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at March 24, 2006 3:35 PM. Posted to Apple.

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