More evidence of Apple planning a Mac OS comeback
According to multiple recent reports, originally spotted by MacRumors, the verbiage of an Apple developer FAQ page has shown, for a brief period of time, the second instance of an interesting “typo”, showing “macOS”, instead of OS X. The “error” has been fixed, but considering that this exact same mistake was made once before on a completely different Apple support page, this occurrence is hardly ordinary.
Apple is a company of many brands. With that said, is there such thing as “too many” brands? Some are beginning to believe in a trend that is making ripples throughout the tech industry, which is causing many major companies, including Microsoft and Apple, to “spring clean” the image of their offerings, and consolidate it into leaner-meaner packages that consumers and business customers understand.
Apple is a company that has been split into two entities, one driven by its mobile operating system, iOS, and the other by its desktop infrastructure, Mac OS X, which has evolved several times, with each new step in the evolution of Apple desktop and laptop products.
This duality has been a staple of Apple since at least 2005, with the induction of the iPhone into the hall of popular culture. Since then, Apple has put considerable investment into making sure that this dual ecosystem is capable of supporting itself, while at the same time keeping products from cannibalizing each other’s market share.
Naming Mac OS X “macOS”, as it has been extensively pointed out by several commenters since the typo was first spotted, would be consistent with the direction taken by Apple with its operating systems branding, (iOS, watchOS, tvOS), which is similar to the once popular i- prefix. That legacy now still includes the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod and the iMac, however, as new product lines are released, like the Apple Watch, this aging naming convention is beginning to fade, in favor of a more direct approach, which is one of the reasons why the Apple Watch was so successful: indeed “I’m wearing a Watch”, sounds a lot better than “I am wearing an Apple iWatch”.