About Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1

This page is no longer maintained; it is being kept for archival purposes only.

Mac OS X 10.0

Apple's much anticipated operating system, Mac OS X (pronounced Mac O S Ten) was released on March 24th, 2001. While keeping many of the standard Macintosh user interface elements such as disk icons and the trash can, Mac OS X has essentially been built from scratch, in the words of Apple offering "the power of Unix with the simplicity and elegance of Macintosh". The beauty of the low-level Unix layer is that you don't have to know and use Unix, unless you would like to. Although somewhat different from that of Mac OS 9 and earlier, the Mac OS X user interface is both attractive and functional as well.

Apple's Mac OS X web pages present an overview and video clips of the many new features of Mac OS X. One particularly interesting user interface feature is the dock, which replaces the Apple menu and is located at the bottom of the screen. Another visible change is the look and feel of Mac OS X folders, introducing a red button to close the folder, a yellow button to hide it and a green button to resize it.

Mac OS X offers true memory protection and preemptive multi-tasking, which perhaps more than anything else means that when an application crashes, other applications are not affected by it, and that is good news for Macintosh users who then don't have to restart their computers when an application crashes or freezes.

Applications for the Mac OS X environment come in two flavors: native (Cocoa or Carbon) and "old" (Classic). Much software has already become native, is in beta or is in the process of becoming native. Examples of such software are Eudora, Internet Explorer, Fetch, StuffIt Expander, Acrobat Reader and Timbuktu; Microsoft Office is not in public beta at this time, but is scheduled for release in the fall of 2001. If an application hasn't been made native, it can likely run in Mac OS X's Classic environment, based on Mac OS 9.1.

There are in particular two reasons why Mac OS X may not be for everyone at this time. First of all, you may want to wait a little until all of the native killer apps that you need have been released. The other reason is that Mac OS X requires a minimum of a beige G3 or an iMac; a G4 is recommended. A minimum of 128MB of memory is also recommended for Mac OS X.

Mac OS X 10.1

Version 10.1 was released on September 29, 2001 and represents a vast improvement over the initial version 10.0. Mac OS X 10.1 is much speedier, safer, more stable and delivers a better user experience including the ability to move the Dock from the bottom to the left or right sides of the screen. New system status icons on the menu bar provide users with easier access to commonly used functions such as the new volume control slider, display settings, date and time, as well as easier access to Internet connection settings.

Mac OS X users can find more than 1,400 native applications in all categories that fully leverage the modern architecture and features of Mac OS X. Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, for instance, was released in November, 2001.