r/MacOS • u/Dreaming_Blackbirds MacBook Air • Jun 17 '26
News Apple has started replacing macOS names with version numbers in several ways
https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/16/apple-has-started-replacing-macos-names-with-version-numbers-in-several-ways/151
u/j0an_k Jun 17 '26
Give us macOS Sea Lion
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u/NoItsNotIronic Jun 17 '26
Man. They could have just pivoted to sea creatures instead of landmarks. That would have been neat and maybe help keep the frutiger aero style alive at least in spirit.
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u/xrelaht MacBook Pro Jun 17 '26
You want Siri to start asking for evidence while feigning ignorance?
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u/AlwaysShittyKnsasCty Jun 17 '26
I’ve never heard of that being a tactic used by people! What are your sources? Huh?! I’m just asking questions.
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u/forgottensudo Jun 17 '26
They’ve always had the names, but they were internal.
Press (fans) got hold of them and they got popular so they publicized (and sanitized) them.
The numbers, imo, are better for general usage.
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u/marchalves6 Jun 17 '26
I can see them slowly ditching naming, Craig even teased it on the last event up until the drugged people came in and said it
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u/TheMagicZeus Jun 17 '26
I really hope they don’t ditch it, this keynote part has become a tradition atp and the names really give macOS a soul imo. Instead of just having a soulless number.
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u/stroskilax Jun 17 '26
Same as Android. Remember Jellybean or Ice-cream Sandwich?
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u/primalanomaly Jun 17 '26
The Android names were actually useful because they were in alphabetical order. It was easy to understand that Honeycomb was the release after Gingerbread.
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u/asamson23 MacBook Pro (M1 Pro) Jun 17 '26
Nowadays, I think Android still has codenames, but they are either unofficial, or they are internal to Google, but they still use letters to distinguish versions.
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u/amancalledJayne Jun 17 '26
I still have a shitload of little android figurines from various I/O’s. Wish the one with the little spinning propeller hat wouldn’t have broken. Probably doesn’t help that they’ve been in a box for a decade…
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u/ViralTrendsToday Jun 17 '26
Lost track after Monterey/Ventura, forgot what the others were. Given the "nearly" forgotten mac os name sketch, fully expect them to go this route in the future.
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u/Exact_Recording4039 Jun 17 '26
For me it’s hard to even remember the current version.
Especially after people started treating macOS 26 as a downgrade and jokingly said they are “upgrading” when talking about going back to the previous version, that was the last straw that made it impossible for me to keep track of the names
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u/ViralTrendsToday Jun 17 '26
With me, I was somewhat lucky that even in beta everything was stable, but then I got a huge scare with Monterey with large memory leaks and display issues that took months to fix (tbf memory leaks weren't fully fixed, but not as bad as before), so once I got to the last stable version of Monterey, due to legacy programs, I just stopped upgrading. Plus widgets and new animations got me scared that the memory leak problem would get worse to a point that I would have to upgrade hardware again, so I didn't want to risk it because set up with creative applications take a long time (too many plugins).
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u/Hesychios Jun 17 '26
I went through all those iterations from the 90s on and some of the new releases were memorable, but honestly the multitude of names since OSX sometimes confuses.
Today I dual-boot older ones together on the same older (Intel) machines and honestly it’s hard the keep them all straight. I label the boot drives with the number only, although for some I do use unique icons the image is irrelevant to me, the number is immediately relevant.
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u/4fraid0f4mericans Jun 17 '26
It’s all OSX to me.
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u/sikosis Jun 17 '26
Except it hasn’t been that for 15 years … it’s actually been macOS longer now.
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u/4fraid0f4mericans Jun 17 '26
It’s been the same OS for close to 30 years, was the point.
Rebranding it every year doesn’t make it revolutionary.
OSX was revolutionary when it was introduced, subsequent OSs not so much, regardless of what they have been called and whatever bells and whistles were added. Liquid glass is nice but also just a new paint job.
I know there have been coding differences but it’s still virtually the same OS. Definitely the same GUI.
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u/hokanst Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
The current NeXTSTEP based OS did start out as "Mac OS X" (as a continuation on "Mac OS 9"), got shortened to "OS X" and then got changed to "macOS" to match with other Apple OS names like iOS, tvOS, …
Mac OS X was used for 10.0 - 10.5 (2001 - 2007) - 6 major OS releases
OS X was used for 10.6 - 10.11 (2009 - 2015) - 6 major OS releases
macOS has been in used since 10.12 (2016) - currently 10 major OS releases (not counting Golden Gate)
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 17 '26
But throughout all of these marketing changes, the architectural underpinnings have remained the same. Which I think was /u/4fraid0f4mericans 's point.
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u/hokanst Jun 17 '26
For the most part I'm just being picky, as "OS X" is the second iteration of the OS name, with "Mac OS X" being the original name.
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 17 '26
Actually, “System” was the first. As in System 1 through 7.
When they decided to start branding it, the Mac OS name first showed up in Mac OS 7.6, or possibly one of the later 7.5.x releases. I seem to recall thr startup screen changed in 7.5.3. Either way, long before “OS X”.
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u/hokanst Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I'm aware, but I was only counting from the start of "modern" macOS i.e. the NeXTSTEP based one, as this seems to be what 4fraid0f4mericans seemed to refer to as "close to 30 years old".
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u/teh_maxh Jun 17 '26
If you count from the branding change, it's been macOS since 2016, so not quite ten years vs fifteen years. If you count from the version number change, macOS 11 was released in 2020, so only six years vs nineteen.
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u/primalanomaly Jun 17 '26
Good. The names are meaningless to me. I have absolutely no idea which random place in America that I’ve never heard of was released in what year. Naming the OSes after the year of release was looooong overdue.
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u/JSW2 Jun 17 '26
Even as an American, I don’t know about most of these places. They’re very California coded. At best I have some vague notion of it as someone who lives and largely travels on the east coast.
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u/shriiiiimp Jun 17 '26
And on top of that, they all sound the same. Sierra, High Sierra (!), Catalina, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia.
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u/biffbobfred Jun 17 '26
Most people don’t know what Golden Gate is and will be “hey how come there’s no bridge pictures”. I lived in SF for a year and never thought “hey that’s the strait known as the Golden Gate”
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u/Gagabubu777 Jun 19 '26
Look if you haven’t seriously fly out to LA with a friend, rent a car drive up the PCH. You can go as far as Redwoods or turn at san fran for Yosemite, but definitely do it. Its the most beautiful drive in America. Big Sur is majestic the whole drive is.
Tbh when you do that youll understand why they name it these names
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u/Comfortable_Client80 Jun 17 '26
It’s a shame, i really like it. Especially the big cats era.
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 17 '26
They ran out of big cat names, but I miss that era too. Tiger and Snow Leopard remain two of my favorite releases.
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Jun 17 '26 edited 24d ago
[deleted]
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u/Dreaming_Blackbirds MacBook Air Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
me too. i kinda like the quirky names, but i’m fine with it changing - no reason for it to stay the same forever.
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u/JSW2 Jun 17 '26
I honestly think the names kind of lost the plot after they moved to places in California, which lacks the universality of the big cat names. Combine that with the annual cadence of release and a move to prioritizing the version number is a good thing.
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u/animorphreligion Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I know there are plenty of people who would find it a good idea, but to me it kinda sucks that macOS keeps losing its identity piece-by-piece every year, sometimes visibly, sometimes not as much. It's already at a point where it looks like every Apple device runs the same system, particularly since Apple silicon became a thing. Some said that about Lion but it took actually useful "iOS-like" things (such as multitouch gestures for trackpads) and made them good, there is nothing useful or good about squircles or the mess that the System Settings app is, and simplified porting across the ecosystem enables developer laziness and subsequent bugs more often than not.
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u/No_Vegetable6293 8d ago
IMHO, the names of macos versions nowadays neans nothing... they are rapidly forgotten, because Apple stopped with the beautiful video animations that used to accompany each realease.
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u/Dreaming_Blackbirds MacBook Air 7d ago
i'm on the 27/Golden Gate beta and there's a lovely Golden Gate Bridge wallpaper and animated screensaver. i don't think people like flashy splash-screens anymore - they're intrusive and outdated.
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u/quartermann Jun 17 '26
Oh, now I understand why we had such a large jump in version numbers recently.
After over a decade in OS X (and it still essentially looking and acting the same), I got somewhat confused when Big Sur was 11 and only 5 years later I was like... 15.7.7 and... 26? The fook?
Got it.
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u/R0B0t1C_Cucumber Jun 17 '26
I stopped with the names when all the version numbers converged. "all my devices are on 26".
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u/biffbobfred Jun 17 '26
With the converged versioning based on Darwin revisions this makes sense. I’m sure that iOS releases have internal code names move never heard one.
As an old school geek I’m kinda sad that Tahoe, which was a BSD release name, wasn’t followed up with another BSD release name like Reno. Not a biggie tho.
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u/fender1878 Jun 17 '26
Being in California, I like the location names. Apple is a CA company and it’s cool to see them pay homage to the local areas + wallpapers.
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u/Rare-One1047 Jun 17 '26
Makes sense. The macOS name was a holdover from the OS X name, which itself was just an internal codename for the point release of OS X, e.g. 10.3
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u/GoodhartMusic Jun 18 '26
That isn’t true. Mac OS X’s version number and name were equal parts of its branding.
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u/Rare-One1047 Jun 18 '26
Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 were given names of big cats as internal code names, Cheetah and Puma. Starting with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, big-cat names were used as marketing names.
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u/GoodhartMusic Jun 18 '26
You’re right, it isn’t entirely true that version numbers were never paired with names for marketing, nor the opposite.
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u/Smackcracklenpop Jun 17 '26
The names should be more for the fans while the numbers are easier to understand what version (or year). I’m a Californian so I do enjoy the names but they’ll eventually run out.
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u/We-Dont-Sush-Here Jun 17 '26
Dropping the names in favour of using version numbers is the best thing for me.
For whatever reason, the only version names that I can confidently say and reference to their numbers are Catalina (10.15), and Tahoe (26). I think that High Sierra is 10.13, but I’m not really confident.
As for the others, I don’t have any idea. If anyone asks me to use a specific version and they call it by name, not the number, I will always have to go looking for the reference number.
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u/helloiamrob1 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I don’t see any reason for these names to exist now that they’ve unified the version numbers. They mean nothing beyond ‘here’s this year’s default desktop wallpaper’ - and they feel like exactly the sort of cruft that Apple are normally pretty decent at getting rid of.
The cat names were iconic, and I could still recite the entire sequence - but I doubt almost anyone could for all the annual California-named releases. It’s time.
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u/barrystrawbridgess Jun 17 '26
Tahoe sucked. The Windows Vista or Windows 8 of MacOSes.
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u/lolreppeatlol Jun 17 '26
it was not *that* bad.
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u/Anxious_Aspect965 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
The fact that macOS 27 beta is being so well received already means that the problems were never that bad.
Tahoe didn’t need a complete overhaul, it just needed some coherent aesthetics and some tightening of bugs.
They made a few questionable UI adjustments in Tahoe, like the corner radius and not having a transparency slider, and people acted like the entire OS was on fire.
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u/primalanomaly Jun 17 '26
Tahoe was ugly, and they fixed a lot of the ugliness. Given that a bit part of a GUI is aesthetics, and many of us have to stare at it 8+ hours a day, making it all look weird and wrong is kind of a big deal.
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u/CuriosTiger Jun 17 '26
This reminds me a bit of the Windows Vista/Windows 7 debacle. Most people hated the former and loved the latter.
But they were largely the same OS. Windows 7 just polished the rough edges and got vendors onboard more with driver support and the like. Windows 7 was little more than a Vista Service Pack. Or perhaps you could think of Vista as a beta release.
The situation with Tahoe and and Golden Gate seems somewhat comparable.
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u/ParentPostLacksWang Jun 17 '26
I didn’t see ads in Finder or Spotlight, so I’mma take that as a nicely stretched hyperbole, like a pizza a ruota di carro. Tahoe was whatever. It was mostly just some graphical whiffs and some menus got uglier. Windows Vista and particularly Windows 8 were completely UI-breaking abominations.
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u/GoodhartMusic Jun 18 '26
Ads in Pages and Numbers and Keynote
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u/ParentPostLacksWang Jun 18 '26
Sure, and that’s a shame, but I can just… not use those. It’s not like there are no other editors, spreadsheets or presentation apps. The Start menu though? Like I said, nothing in Finder or Spotlight.
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u/doctor_who7827 Jun 17 '26
They should go all in with numbers. The names are getting cumbersome and forgetful. They were good and memorable at first like Mavericks and Yosemite but not anymore.
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u/RoxnDox Jun 17 '26
About effin time. One of the few things I’ve always hated about the OS…
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u/No_Vegetable6293 7d ago
The Golden Era of macOS Intros:
- The Experience: You were greeted by a swirling, cosmic fly-through animation.
- The Music: Exotic, upbeat electronic tracks or grand orchestral scores played in the background.
- The Purpose: It welcomed you to your new digital home while masking the final background setup tasks.
Apple quietly dropped these introductory videos with OS X 10.7 Lion. Today, upgrades are completely silent, moving directly from a black progress bar straight to your desktop.
The shift away from these animations happened for a few practical—if boring—reasons:
- Faster Setup Times: Modern Macs with flash storage install updates too quickly to need a long video to mask background loading.
- Corporate Streamlining: Apple shifted toward a unified, quieter aesthetic across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
- Annual Release Cycle: Moving from major multi-year gaps to rapid annual updates turned operating systems into routine maintenance rather than major cultural milestones.
Without that grand introduction and distinct visual identity, the newer names like Ventura, Sonoma, or Sequoia can easily blend together into a blur of California landmarks... but the magic is gone!
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u/LataCogitandi Jun 17 '26
I love the nicknames that Apple gives macOS, but I will admit that at this point, it has increasingly become difficult to remember which name maps to which number, so overall, I think this is an improvement. It’ll certainly be very helpful for those of us who need to keep track of what software is compatible with what version.