macOS Big Sur has been around for weeks now, and even its first major update has already rolled out. There is nothing unusual about this, this is how the lifecycle of all versions of macOS has been. But there is something curious about Big Sur: Apple has changed the pace of numbering with its updates. More precisely, he multiplied it by ten.
Catalina was 10:15, Big Sur 11 and her successor will be … 12
Before Big Sur, all major versions of macOS were counted as “tenths of 10.” We started with Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther … so on up to macOS 10.14 Mojave and macOS 10.15 Catalina. It all fits well with what Steve Jobs said about macOS X in his original presentation, predicting that macOS X would deliver all the innovations for the next twenty years.
And twenty years later, in 2020, macOS Big Sur arrives with the news that it’s no longer a macOS 10: it’s a macOS 11. That’s a huge leap forward, more than justified by the arrival of Apple’s own chips on Macs. Apple is making it clear that Big Sur is the foundation for what we’ll see in the transition years and beyond.
That said, we’re all inferring that from now on we’ll see the successive “ tenths ” of macOS 11 with the successors of Big Sur … but no. We found out that Big Sur’s first major update was not 11.0.1 … yes no 11.1. We didn’t expect to see this release until next year.
This means that the macOS that will be presented at WWDC 2021 will be macOS 12.. We’ve been years and years in macOS 10, but from now on, macOS versions will progress year after year. We can assume that Apple made this change to have the same rate of progress as on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS, which also have version numbers of 1 per year.
It is not necessary to be complicated, quite simply Apple wanted to mark the change of era towards Apple Silicon and from here to standardize its versions. But it’s something that caught my attention, and that of course gives importance to the change that Macs will experience from now on.
