macOS
More info
- Owner
- Apple
- Released
- 2001
- Type
- Operating system
- Website
- apple.com
Apple's desktop operating system — a certified Unix underneath an interface that gives no sign of it.
Today's macOS is not descended from Mac OS 9. It is built on NeXTSTEP, which arrived when Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and got Steve Jobs back in the bargain. The kernel, XNU, pairs a Mach microkernel with BSD layers, which is why ps, launchctl and SSH are all sitting in the terminal. Mac OS X 10.0 shipped in 2001, was renamed macOS in 2016, and has been formally certified as UNIX under the Single UNIX Specification since 2007.
Its popularity with developers comes from the combination: a Unix shell and Homebrew below, commercial tooling and hardware drivers that actually work above. The 2020 move to Apple Silicon was the second architecture switch in the system's life after PowerPC to Intel in 2006, and both times backwards compatibility was solved with a translator — Rosetta and Rosetta 2 respectively.