Quartz Extreme
GPU compositing for the whole desktop, on any card with 16 MB of VRAM and OpenGL. Aqua finally ran the way it had always looked like it should.
At launch
- Announced
- May 2002
- Released
- August 24, 2002
- Follows
- Puma (10.1)
- Followed by
- Panther (10.3)
- Architecture
- PowerPC
Overview
The release that started using the graphics card for the graphics.
Quartz Extreme handed window compositing to the GPU. Every window became a texture, every drag and fade became something the video card did instead of the processor — and Aqua stopped costing so much to look at.
Apple also put the cat on the shrink-wrap for the first time; the code name became the product name. And a handful of small things arrived that turned out to matter for two decades: Rendezvous, which became Bonjour, and iChat, which became Messages.
Quartz Extreme
Every window became a texture on the card.
Compositing moved off the CPU and onto any GPU with 16 MB and OpenGL support. It is the reason the genie effect stopped stuttering, and the architecture the Mac has composited with ever since.
Windows composited by the graphics card
Features
What shipped.
A faster foundation, and three apps that outlived the release by twenty years.
iChat
AIM-compatible instant messaging with speech-bubble threads, built into the system. It became iChat AV, then Messages, and the bubbles never left.
At launch
Rendezvous
Zero-configuration networking: printers, shares and services simply appearing. Renamed Bonjour after a trademark dispute, and still how a Mac finds a printer.
At launch
Sherlock 3
Internet search channels for flights, films and stocks — and an object lesson in developer relations, having absorbed the third-party Watson almost wholesale.
At launch
Address Book
A single system contacts database that Mail, iChat and anything else could read, instead of every app keeping its own.
At launch
Junk mail filter
An adaptive spam filter in Mail that learned from what you marked, at a moment when spam was becoming genuinely unmanageable.
At launch
Universal Access
Screen zoom, high-contrast display, sticky keys and mouse keys, built into System Preferences rather than bolted on.
At launch
Inkwell
Handwriting recognition for graphics tablets — inherited from the Newton, and a preview of where handwriting would eventually go on iPad.
At launch
Finder search
A search field in every Finder window toolbar, three years before Spotlight made searching the whole disk instant.
At launch
Naming
The year the code name became the brand.
Cheetah and Puma were internal only — Apple sold their releases as "Mac OS X" and "Mac OS X 10.1". Jaguar was the first where the cat made it onto the box, into the advertising, and onto a shrink-wrap sleeve printed with fur.
Every release for the next decade took a cat: Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion. Apple ran out in 2013 and moved to California landmarks, where it has stayed.
Desktop
Still blue.
Three releases in, and the default desktop was still a blue abstract. Apple would not put a photograph on it until 2014.
Aqua GraphiteFine arcs over deep blueThere 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.
Apple named ten releases after big cats before moving to California in 2013.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Jaguar raised the floor: a built-in USB port ruled out the earliest beige G3 machines, and Quartz Extreme needed a card many older Macs did not have.
- Processor
- PowerPC G3, G4 or G5
- Memory
- 128 MB
- Disk space
- 3 GB
- Requires
- A built-in USB port
- Quartz Extreme
- 16 MB VRAM, AGP