Introduction
MacOS Catalina is the 16th major version of Apple’s operating system. It’s got very little in common with the original Mac OS, the one that saw Apple through the 1980s and 1990s. Apple dumped that in 2001, when CEO Steve Jobs decided it was time for a change. Apple had spent too many years piling new features onto a software foundation originally poured in 1984. Programmers and customers complained of the “spaghetti code” the Mac OS had become.
So today, underneath macOS’s classy, shining desktop is Unix, the industrial-strength, rock-solid OS that drives many a website and university. It’s not new by any means; in fact, it’s decades old and has been polished by generations of programmers.
Note
Beginning with Sierra in 2016, Apple stopped calling the Mac operating system “OS X.” It’s now “macOS.” That’s partly because Apple sought consistency with the software in its other products—iOS and watchOS—and partly, no doubt, because it was tired of hearing people pronounce it “oh ess sex.”
What’s New in Catalina
Having run out of big cat species (Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion), Apple started naming its Mac operating systems after places in California. There was the surfing site Mavericks, followed by Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave. And now there’s Catalina, named after Santa Catalina, a rocky island off the coast of Southern California.
The changes in Catalina are either “thoughtful and strategic” ...
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