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macOS
operating system for Apple computers / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
macOS, named Mac OS X from 2001 to 2012 and OS X until 2016,[4] is an operating system (OS) for computers made by Apple Inc. These are called Macintosh computers, or Macs. It differs from other computers, as macOS is supposed to run only on Macs and not on other computers. However, people have made macOS run on computers that are not Macs. This is called Hackintosh and violates macOS' license agreement.
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Developer | Apple Inc. |
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Written in | |
OS family | Macintosh, Unix |
Working state | Current |
Source model | Closed source (with open source components) |
Initial release | March 24, 2001; 23 years ago (2001-03-24) |
Latest release | 10.15.5 Supplemental Update (June 1, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-06-01)) [±] |
Latest preview | 10.15.6 beta 4 (July 9, 2020; 4 years ago (2020-07-09)) [±] |
Marketing target | Personal computing |
Available in | 40 languages[3] |
List of languages [as of macOS Catalina]: Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (India), English (United Kingdom), English (United States), Finnish, French (Canada), French (France), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (Spain), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese | |
Update method |
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Platforms | |
Kernel type | Hybrid (XNU) |
Default user interface | Aqua (Graphical) |
License | Commercial software, proprietary software |
Preceded by | Classic Mac OS |
Official website | www |
Support status | |
Supported |
macOS first came out in 2001, and is completely different from the "classic" Mac OS that it replaced. Unlike the first operating system, macOS (since OS X) is based on the UNIX operating system (current versions have UNIX 03 certification[5]) and on technologies developed between 1985 and 1997 at NeXT, a company that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple in 1985. The "X" in Mac OS X and OS X is the Roman numeral for the number 10 and is pronounced as such. The core of macOS is an open source OS called Darwin, but Darwin itself cannot run macOS software.
macOS releases are named after types of big cats, or California landmarks, and has a version number that starts with 10.0, 11.0, 12.0, 13.0 & 14.0. The latest version of macOS is macOS Sonoma (14.2.1).