Happy 10th anniversary, Mac OS X!

Today marks the completion of the 10th year of Mac OS X existence. The OS X has gone a long way through those years – abandoned the PowerPC architecture, adopted the Intel one, dropping the Classic apps support and brought completely new looks, tons of new features, apps, services and utilities.

Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah

The first Mac OS launched way back in 1984, while the Mac OS X was publicly released on 24 March 2001. Today we are already looking forward to the next major release – Lion, which will finally create a bridge between the Apple mobile platform iOS and the desktop OS X.

The Mac OS X releases are all named after big felines – Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion.

Here are a few screenshots that show the Mac OS X evolution through the years:

Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, 10.3 Panther and 10.5 Leopard

The latest Mac OS X – 10.7 Lion – is expected this summer. It will bring TRIM support for the SSD drives (already included in the latest Snow Leopard because of the new MacBook Air); new looks; unified Expose, Spaces and Dashboard into Launchpad; full-screen app mode (as long as the app itself supports it); iOS-like app current state auto-save when closing, new multi-touch gestures and scrolling; and many more features.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

The new version will drop the Rosetta support for Classic apps and Front Row app. It also won’t come with Java and Flash pre-intalled, but naturally you will be able to install them if you want.

We are yet to see where the Mac OS X and the Macs are heading, but I bet Apple is preparing a touch-enabled laptop – a mix between an iPad and a MacBook. But one thing is sure – Apple has a plan (so far a quite successful one) and a clear vision for the future of its products and software. That can’t turn bad, right?

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