Speed
Windows resized live rather than in outline, menus opened instantly, and the Finder stopped feeling like it was thinking. The single reason to install it.
At launch
- Announced
- July 2001
- Released
- September 25, 2001
- Follows
- Cheetah (10.0)
- Followed by
- Jaguar (10.2)
- Architecture
- PowerPC
Overview
Apple gave it away, because the first one had not been ready.
Six months after 10.0 shipped, Puma arrived as a free upgrade — handed out over the counter in Apple Stores to anyone who asked. It added no grand new idea. It made the existing one work.
Menus opened without a pause. Windows resized in real time. DVDs played. Printers printed. More than a hundred and fifty applications had been rewritten in the meantime, and the Classic environment started to look like something you could leave behind rather than live in.
Performance
The release where it stopped being slow.
Apple's own comparison chart for 10.1 was almost entirely about speed: application launch, window resize, menu tracking, file copying. That was the whole pitch, and it was the right one.
Where 10.0's headroom went
Features
What shipped.
Mostly the things 10.0 had promised and not delivered.
DVD playback
Mac OS X could finally play a DVD, six months after launch. Until then, watching a film meant booting into Mac OS 9.
At launch
CD burning
Burning discs from the Finder and from iTunes, without a third-party utility and without leaving the operating system.
At launch
Printer support
Around two hundred more printers worked out of the box — a mundane fix that decided whether a great many people could use 10.x at all.
At launch
Dock positioning
The Dock could move to the left or right edge of the screen, and the Apple menu became useful again.
At launch
Networking
AppleShare over IP, SMB and WebDAV, so a Mac could sit on a Windows network without an argument.
At launch
OpenGL
A significantly faster OpenGL stack, which mattered for the games that were only just starting to appear on the platform.
At launch
Image capture
Cameras and scanners mounted and imported without vendor software, an early sign of the just-plug-it-in approach.
At launch
Free
No charge to 10.0 owners. Apple mailed CDs out and stacked them by the door in retail stores — a tacit admission about what 10.0 had been.
At launch
The transition
The year the Mac ran two operating systems at once.
Through 2001 and 2002, most Macs shipped able to boot either Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X, and most people did both — X for mail and the web, 9 for the work that paid. Classic bridged the gap, running 9 inside a window at close to full speed.
In January 2002 Apple held a mock funeral for Mac OS 9 on the Macworld stage, coffin and eulogy included. Machines stopped booting into it that year, though Classic itself survived until the Intel transition killed it in 2006.
Desktop
Aqua Blue, again.
Puma kept its predecessor's desktop unchanged — the same blue, on the same day one after another.
Aqua BlueUnchanged from 10.0There 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.
Cheetah and Puma were internal names that leaked. Apple would not put a cat on a box until Jaguar.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
The same machines 10.0 ran on, with the same memory floor — it simply used them better.
- Processor
- PowerPC G3 or G4
- Memory
- 128 MB
- Disk space
- 1.5 GB
- Machines
- Power Mac G3 and later
- Also
- iMac, iBook, PowerBook G3