October 28, 2005

Mac OS Timeline

I got to thinking this morning, what is Apple gonna do when they feel it's time to "end of life" OS X? What will they call the next thing? OS XI? OS 11? OSEleven?

Anyway, that got me to thinking, that OS X has been around for a long time, but I wondered how its age compares to other "whole number" releases. So...

Just for the record, I collected the initial release dates for each "whole-number" release of the Mac Operating System.

versionfirst releaseage when superceded
1.0January 1984 (1yr 3mo)
2.0 April 1985 (9 mo)
3.0 January 1986 (1yr)
4.0 January 1987 (9mo)
5.0 October 1987 (11mo) src
6.0 September 1988 (2yrs 8mo)
7.0 May 1991 (6yrs 2mo)
8.0 July 1997 (2yrs 3mo)
9.0 October 1999 (1yr 5mo)
OS X
10.0 "Cheetah" March 2001 (6mo)
10.1 "Puma" September 2001 (11mo)
10.2 Jaguar August 2002 (1yr 2mo)
10.3 Panther October 2003 (1yr 6mo)
10.4 Tiger April 2005 (1yr, 8mo, so far*)
10.5 Leopard due Late 2006*

* UPDATE: As of 12/2006: Leopard's predicted release was slipped to Spring 2007.

src: wikipedia, except where noted.

Posted by jackhodgson at October 28, 2005 11:09 AM