Starting in 2011, Apple would begin to shift to annual releases of OS X in 2013, with the release of OS X Mavericks, the company would ditch the cat names and turn OS X into free, annual updates. OS X also spanned generations of Apple hardware, from the early PowerPC days of the iMac and MacBook, to the Intel shift of 2005, to newer devices like the ultra-thin MacBook Air or the astronomically priced Mac Pro.

The earlier versions of OS X - famously named after their “big cat” codenames, like Jaguar, Lion, Leopard, and Tiger - were actually paid upgrades that customers had to purchase, not free downloads. The release of Mac OS X was a dividing line in the sand between the original era of Apple’s computers and the birth of a new generation of devices.Īpple would spend the next decade further refining and enhancing OS X, with updates released far more sporadically than the now-annual releases that have come to define all of the company’s software. The original version of Mac OS X (which Apple rebranded to macOS to better match its iOS, watchOS, and tvOS software brands with the release of macOS Sierra back in 2016) was released as a public beta for $29.99 back in September of 2000, as a successor to Mac OS 9, the last of the “classic” Apple operating systems that dated back to the original Macintosh in 1984. Mac OS X is finally finished, with Apple confirming that it’s officially moving to macOS 11 with the newly announced Big Sur update after almost 20 years of OS X (or macOS 10.) That means that this fall, users will finally be upgrading from the 10.X versions that Apple has been using for nearly two decades to version 11.0.

What is the most current mac os version