25 years ago, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco and unveiled Mac OS X, ushering in a new era for the Mac and the world of desktop computing as a whole.
It sounds like hyperbole, but after watching the keynote for the second time – the first time was from the front row, thank you very much! – is remarkable what a huge moment this was for Apple and the Mac.
It’s funny. The remarkable thing about the moment is actually how uneventfully it seems. Watching the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing perfectly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Seen by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into insanity by its leader.
But I was there and I can tell you it wasn’t. This was the moment, after 16 years of classic Mac OS—and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough—when all the Mac’s flaws were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of 21 . century.
How did it go for Apple? The keynote seems so strange now because almost everything in it is just how the Mac workseven 25 years later. Yes, interface styles have changed over time, but that moment on stage in January 2000 redefined the Mac for 25 years and counting.
The thick of it
Let me provide some of the historical context. The original Mac OS, released in 1984, was revolutionary – but its foundations were from the earliest era of personal computers. Its revolutionary graphical interface was famously black and white, and it ran one program at a time. Fifteen years later, it was clear that modern operating systems needed to have protected memory, solid multitasking and powerful graphics functionality – but the classic Mac OS had been unable to achieve any of that. Apple had tried a few different OS update projects, but they had all failed.
The last Hail Mary bought Steve Jobs’ NeXt, which was struggling – but owned an operating system, NeXtStep, that had all the features the Mac didn’t have. And hey, Steve Jobs is going to work with Apple again! Not a bad package deal. Worth every penny if you ask me.
However, NeXtStep was not Mac OS. It had some features you’d recognize today as being Mac-like, but for the most part, its interface seemed quite alien. It was built for a super-niche audience, as opposed to the broad Mac audience that had to be migrated to in order for the transition to be successful.
In the three years between Jobs’ return and the unveiling of Mac OS X, Apple’s software efforts were devoted to aligning the expectations of Mac users with what could be done with NextStep. At the same time, there was a culture clash where previous NeXtStep developers did not necessarily understand what these expectations were.
The developers and designers at Apple had to go through all the features of both operating systems and decide what would happen: do it the Mac way, do it the next way, let users choose between these two ways, or choose a completely new path. Each of these decisions had enormous consequences. If things weren’t familiar enough to Mac users, switching to Mac OS X would be as foreign as switching to Windows—and in the late ’90s, Apple couldn’t afford to give any of its customers a excuse to join the rest of the world in giving in to Microsoft. But Apple’s development team couldn’t reach the goal if it didn’t reuse large parts of what NeXt had built.
These decisions will shape the path of Mac users for the next quarter century.
Lick it
One of the design goals was when you saw it, you wanted to lick it. And then we call it Aqua. And this is the architecture of Mac OS 10.– Steve Jobs
Apple managed to “introduce” Mac OS X numerous times, from Steve Jobs’ first appearance on stage at Macworld 1997 to the shipping day of Mac OS X 1.0 in the spring of 2001. It makes it difficult to celebrate an anniversary date, but the introduction of Aqua on January 5, 2000 is pretty good.
So much of what we take for granted today is in the first Steve Jobs demo to rapturous applause. The Dock made its debut that day, complete with the “genius effect” to minimize and maximize windows. Of course, that Dock was a mess – you could drag files into it and they disappeared from the desktop! And you could drag them back and they would reappear on the desktop. (Files were actually in the Dock folder in your user folder! But that Dock was rewritten a lot before it ever shipped.)
The OS X Finder itself was also revealed that day. Some consider this a day that will live in infamy, but it’s certainly the same Finder we use now! It offers the “classic” Mac icon and list views, as well as a column view imported from NeXt and favored by Steve Jobs. Jobs loved the new feature that lets you navigate through your file system in a single window, instead of having every double-click on a folder create a new window, as well as the addition of a web browser-style back button.
It’s a bit of a head turn to watch Jobs explain how windows now have three buttons in the top left corner, colored “like a stop light”, with symbols that appear when you roll the mouse cursor over them. These buttons have become as much symbols of the Mac as the menu bar itself, but this was the first time anyone saw them.
The list goes on. Jobs’ favorite NeXtStep app was an email client, and that explains his delight in introducing Mail, a brand new (cough) Apple app that would be included for free with Mac OS X. He seems particularly giddy about the fact , that the app knows who you’ve emailed with and will suggest names as you type, something else we’ve taken for granted for the past 25 years.
And of course, all of this supported the open-source Unix base that still underpins all of Apple’s platforms. Jobs was applauded for things like dropping a menu while video continued to play and run a badly behaved app that crashed without crashing the entire system. The audience gasps in amazement as an “The app has stopped unexpectedly” warning pops up, something that today would be a minor inconvenience at best. (Also, an amazing bit of trivia: The QuickTime movie Jobs uses to demo Mac OS X is the trailer for “Mission Impossible 2.” How does Tom Cruise do that?!)
The original Mac OS X was a breakthrough for the Mac that is still felt today.
Apple
It’s also worth noting the amazing new features that Jobs introduced that day that went nowhere. There used to be a button on the far right edge of a window’s title bar that put you in “single window mode” to simplify using the Mac. While modern Macs have a full-screen mode that performs this task, placing this mode on a window’s title bar was odd, and the feature was removed before OS X 1.0 shipped the following March.
And then there’s the strange case of the Apple logo. In Jobs’ demo, and indeed in the Mac OS X Public Beta released later that year, there was an Apple logo in the middle of the menu bar. It didn’t matter. But by the time Mac OS X 1.0 arrived in 2001, the Apple menu—a standard of classic Mac OS—had been revived and placed at the far left of the menu bar.
However, the new Apple menu was not like the original one. (In the last days of the classic Mac OS, it was essentially a folder full of anything you wanted to put in there.) The new Apple menu looked more like the old Specials menu in the Finder, where you could shutdown or restart your Mac. It’s pretty much the same to this day.
25 years later, Mac’s Sequoia still has elements from the first Aqua reveal – although the Apple logo is no longer in the center of the menu bar.
Apple
Welcome to the future
It’s hard to believe that Mac OS X has been with us for a quarter of a century, which is much longer than the original Mac OS. From the interface design to the technical foundation, the longevity of OS X and all the operating systems it has spawned – macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS, even watchOS and tvOS – is a huge endorsement of the decisions Apple made at the end of 90s and early 2000s.
“This is our foundation for the next decade of Macintosh operating systems, and we’re excited about it,” Jobs said on stage 25 years ago. He undershot a little bit. What he introduced that day is still the foundation of the Mac… and just about everything else Apple does. No matter what comes next, no matter where Apple and the technology industry go from here, there’s no doubt that Mac OS X has exceeded all the expectations we had for it on January 5, 2000.