The Dock
Running apps, favourites, minimised windows and the Trash, all in one strip that magnified under the pointer. It replaced the Apple menu, the Application menu and the Control Strip in a single stroke.
At launch
- Announced
- January 2000
- Released
- March 24, 2001
- Follows
- Mac OS 9
- Followed by
- Puma (10.1)
- Architecture
- PowerPC
Overview
Fifteen years of trying to replace the Mac OS, and here it is.
Apple had been failing to ship a modern operating system since the late eighties — Pink, Taligent, Copland, Gershwin, all of them abandoned. The answer came from outside: NeXTSTEP, acquired with NeXT in 1996, rebuilt on a BSD core and dressed in something called Aqua.
It was, by common agreement, not very good yet. It was slow, it could not burn a CD or play a DVD, printer support was thin, and most people ran their real work in the Classic environment emulating Mac OS 9 in a window. But underneath sat protected memory and preemptive multitasking, which meant that for the first time a crashing application no longer took the whole machine with it.
Aqua
Buttons you wanted to lick.
Steve Jobs' line, and he was not being modest. Gel buttons that pulsed, drop shadows under every window, translucent menus, and a Dock that magnified as the pointer swept across it. Nothing else on a computer looked remotely like it in 2001.
The Dock, magnifying under the pointer
Features
What shipped.
A brand new foundation, a brand new face, and a long list of things that were not ready yet.
Protected memory
Every application in its own memory space. One app crashing stopped being everyone's problem — the single biggest practical improvement over Mac OS 9.
At launch
Aqua
Pinstripes, gel buttons, traffic lights, sheets that dropped out of title bars, and genie-effect minimising. Almost none of it existed on any other desktop.
At launch
Darwin
A BSD userland on the Mach microkernel, open-sourced as Darwin. The Mac quietly became a certified-adjacent Unix workstation you could buy in a shopping centre.
At launch
Terminal
A real command line, shipped in the box, on a consumer Mac. It brought a whole population of Unix developers to Apple hardware.
At launch
A new Cocoa mail client written for the platform rather than carried over — one of the first apps to show what the new frameworks could do.
At launch
Classic
Mac OS 9 running as an application, so a decade of existing software still worked. Most people spent most of their time in it for the first year.
At launch
Quartz
A compositing window server built on PDF drawing. Beautiful, resolution-independent, and — on a 400 MHz G3 with no GPU acceleration — extremely slow.
At launch
Carbon and Cocoa
Two ways to write apps: Carbon for porting existing Mac code, Cocoa inherited from NeXT for new work. That split shaped Mac software for the next fifteen years.
At launch
The long road
How a company got its operating system from a company it bought.
Apple spent the nineties failing to ship a successor to the classic Mac OS. Copland, the most public attempt, collapsed in 1996. With nothing in the pipeline, Apple went shopping — and chose NeXT over Be, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company he had founded.
What arrived on 24 March 2001 was recognisably NeXTSTEP with a Mac face: the same object frameworks, the same Unix underpinnings, the same display model rebuilt around PDF. Nearly everything Apple has shipped since — iOS, watchOS, all of it — descends from this release.
Desktop
Aqua Blue.
One wallpaper, the colour of the interface it sat behind. Mac OS X would stay resolutely blue for its first four releases.
Aqua BlueThe desktop of March 2001There was only ever one. A system-wide Dark Mode did not arrive until Mojave in 2018, so this page's light and dark appearances are ours, not Apple's — the switch in the corner still works, but the desktop of the day looked like this and only this.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Before the California landmarks and before the big cats were marketed, releases carried internal code names. This one was Cheetah.
macOS 9 · 1999
Mac OS 9
The end of the classic Mac OS line, which had run since 1984.
macOS 10.0 · 2001
Cheetah
The first release. Aqua, the Dock, protected memory — and not much speed.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Mac OS X 10.0 asked for a PowerPC G3 or better and 128 MB of memory — a serious ask in 2001, when many shipping Macs had 64 MB.
- Processor
- PowerPC G3 or G4
- Memory
- 128 MB
- Disk space
- 1.5 GB
- Machines
- Power Mac G3 and later
- Also
- iMac, iBook, PowerBook G3