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.