On March 24th 2001, Apple released Mac OS X, a completely brand new Operating System for the Mac. Unfortunately it was bug-ridden and unstable…
Bringing technology from Steve Jobs’ NeXT (the company he started after being ousted from Apple) and based on UNIX, Mac OS X was a very different thing to the operating system it replaced Mac OS 9.
Revealing the new ‘Aqua’ look to the system and icons (something users of macOS 26 Tahoe will recognise!) it was ambitious and very pretty to look at. Sadly for the early adopters – of which I was one – it was very often crashing for no apparent reason and slowed the computer down horrendously. In fact, it was so awful that rather than the now-familiar 10.x.x updates, it went straight to Mac OS X 10.1 the following September.
Still not brilliant but now at least stable and useable, Apple was on the way to building the operating system we know it as today as well as it’s ‘children’ – iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and visionOS.
Without that ground-breaking false start, I don’t think that Apple to would be anywhere close to where they are today.
