How Apple Transformed Mac OS Over The Years

Apple’s branding machine is so good we sometimes forget that Mac OS wasn’t always the user-friendly, seamless experience that it is today. Granted, it was always a couple of steps ahead of the competition, but looking back over the years, you can see that early iterations of the product lacked many of the basic features we’ve come to love and rely on today.

Take the ability to manage your open applications. Apple users generally believe that this is something that has been around forever – or at least since the 1980s. But if you look back at the history of Mac OS updates, you soon discover that this essential feature only arrived in 2003 with the Panther OS X update.

Today, most Apple users rely on iCloud to store all their digital information safely and securely. Again, it seems as if this service has been around forever, thanks to the fact that people rely on it so heavily. But looking back at the history of new releases shows that the iCloud only came along in 2011 with the introduction of Lion OS X – that’s just eight years ago.

Of course, the culmination of all these changes over the years has given customers the impression that their Mac experience is, and always has been, better than the competition. Apple was smart in the way that they introduced features now considered basic a couple of years ahead of the competition, giving users reasons to prefer their Macs to any other computing platform. This is what allowed the company to retain its large market share. Check out this infographic showing the evolution over time.

Infographic designed by Setapp showing Mac OS version history