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macOS is a series of proprietary graphics operating systems developed and marketed by Apple Inc. Since 2001, it has been Apple’s main Mac operating system. In the desktop, laptop, and home PC and by web usage, this is the second most widely used desktop OS after Microsoft Windows.

macOS is the second major Macintosh series of operating systems. The first classically named classic Mac OS, which was introduced in 1984, and its final release was Mac OS 9 in 1999. The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released in March 2001 with its first update, 10.1, arriving later this year. Then Apple named its releases in honor of the big cats that continued OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Starting with OS X 10.9 Mavericks, versions have been baptized in some places in California. Apple reduced the name to “OS X” in 2012, and then changed it to “macOS” in 2016, adopting the nomenclature that it uses for its other operating systems, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. The latest version is macOS Catalina, released in October 2019.

Between 1999 and 2009, Apple sold a separate series of operating systems called Mac OS X Server. The initial version, Mac OS X Server 1.0, was released in 1999 with a user interface similar to Mac OS 8.5. New versions were introduced simultaneously with the desktop version of Mac OS X. Starting with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, server functions were provided as a separate package in the Mac App Store.

macOS is based on the Unix operating system and technologies developed in NeXT from 1985–1997, the company that Apple creator Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple in 1985. The “X” in Mac OS X and OS X is the Roman numeral after numeral 10 and pronounced as such. X was an important part of corporate identity and marketing of the operating system in the early years of its existence, but gradually gained fame after the release of Snow Leopard in 2009. UNIX 03 certification has been obtained for Intel Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and all Intel releases. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard up to the current version also has UNIX 03 certification. MacOS shares its Unix-based kernel called Darwin and many of its frameworks with iOS, iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS. A heavily modified version of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was used for the first generation Apple TV.

Mac OS X releases from 1999 to 2005 worked on Macs with PowerPCs of the period. After Apple announced the switch to Intel processors in 2006, Intel-based 32-bit and 64-bit Mac computers were released. Versions of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (2011) run exclusively on Intel 64-bit processors, unlike the ARM architecture used on iOS and watchOS devices, and do not support PowerPC applications.

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