Am I the only one increasingly frustrated with macOS's naming scheme? I have no idea what the latest version is. Ubuntu versioning gets this right; you can parse their codenames alphabetically to derive the semantic version. But Apple's heuristic here seems to be "throw a dart at a map of California".
> The marketing names for macOS and OSX have always been random other than having a general theme to it.
Not entirely true: two of the cats were name variations of their predecessors to express an intent of limited end-user / feature updates and a focus on refinement (even though taxonomically the cats have basically no relationships outside of being cats, mountain lions aren’t even in the same genus as lions)
Since they moved macOS off version 10.x (finally), "Apple's crack marketing team" left the desert (Mojave) for the Pacific coast. Unfortunately, they didn't plan the trip carefully, so they started at Big Sur with macOS 11, went north to Monterey for macOS 12, then turned around and headed back south to Ventura for macOS 13. At least those locations are in alphabetical order -- but with Ventura they seem to have painted themselves into a corner.
So will macOS 14 be further south (Carlsbad?) or back north (Eureka?) -- stay tuned...
I think you overestimate the knowledge most people have of California. I've been to Cali a bunch of times and none of the names they picked mean anything to me except Big Sur, but that's pretty obscure. I wouldn't expect anyone around me to know what or where it is unless they happened to be really big into the tech scene.
US tech firms have a long history of using US place names as code names for operating system releases. Windows 95 was Chicago, if I recall correctly.
It wasn't much better with big cats. There were two sort of semantically related releases, Leopard/Snow Leopard and Lion/Mountain Lion. Of those on the Leopard/Snow Leopard I thought made sense as Snow Leopard was a "oh shit fix all the bugs" release. SL was the first full OS release after the Intel transition and 64-bit kernel.
Big Sur, Monterey, Yosemite, El Capitan, Catalina... all worked for me because I've either been there or there was a screensaver/wallpaper to associate them with their locales. I really don't know a thing about Ventura.
Yes. In Big Cat era, you could at least memorise those names which have some meaning to nearly everyone around the world, and it always had a version number.
Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" – 2010
Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" – 2012
Now it is only a name I guess only people in US / California will know or understand. The same joke From Apple's "crack marketing team" and played out by Craig Federighi for something like 10 years[1].
But I guess that is post Steve Jobs's Apple for you.
[1] Just guessing since I remember they started using this line after Forstall left.
Let's go back to cats. Since macOS is becoming more and more like iOS, we don't have to limit ourselves to big cats anymore. Small cats are on the table too. There's gotta be at least 100 cat breeds, that should last us a while.
That's definitely my issue: over the years, we have accumulated more and more and more of these names. When someone talks about iOS 4 or iOS 7 in some article I am reading, I know what they are talking about and the extent to which the version matters; but, when someone talks about macOS Gaviota, I have to think "wait, was that the one that just came out, or was that one of the ones I haven't had to think about in a decade? oh shit... maybe it's the one that got announced today and I just haven't heard the name yet?!".
(That said, I will also note that frustration is not inherently constant even when something is truly static: sometimes you get used to something over time and it stops bothering you, while other times it slowly drives you mad.)
