History of Mac OS X

The upcoming Mac OS release of 10.7 Lion has made us here at SoftwareMedia.com reflect on the history of Mac OS X and the advancement it has made over the past decade. From the heyday of PowerPCs and G3s to blazingly fast Intel i7s and monster 27-inch iMacs, the Mac operating system history for version ten has been full of "oohs" and "ahhs".

For each release of Mac OS X, Apple assigned a large cat from the animal kingdom to be its codename. The names became quite popular in the Apple community, and now it is more common to call a release by its codename that it's numbered version. This goes the same for OS X Lion—whose release date is expected sometime this summer.

Below we've pieced together a Mac OS chronology for version X, complete with codenames, box art, key features and, of course, the Mac OS release dates. We hope you enjoy our tribute to the history of Mac OS X and are as excited as we are about the OS X 10.7 Lion debut this year.

10.0 Cheetah

Relase Date: 3/24/2001

KEY FEATURES: Dock, Aqua interface

10.1 Puma

Relase Date: 9/25/2001

KEY FEATURES: Performance boost from 10.0, DVD playback support

10.2 Jaguar

Relase Date: 8/23/2002

KEY FEATURES: Bonjour, inkwell

10.3 Panther

Relase Date: 10/24/2003

KEY FEATURES: Safari, Expose

10.4 Tiger

Relase Date: 4/29/2005

KEY FEATURES: Spotlight, Dashboard

10.5 Leopard

Relase Date: 10/26/2007

KEY FEATURES: Boot Camp, Time Machine

10.6 Snow Leopard

Relase Date: 8/28/2009

KEY FEATURES: Marketed as +0 features; instead, focused on improving existing features for compatibility and functionality

10.7 Lion

Relase Date: Summer 2011

KEY FEATURES: Launchpad, Mac app store