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Is Big Sur worthy of being 11.0?

I think they stayed on version 10.x for so long (mostly under Steve) because it was a subtle reminder that his work at NeXT lived on at Apple. There were also rumors that they quickly bumped the classic Mac OS to from 8 to 9 to justify landing on 10 so that they could use the 'X' for 10 when they launched the new OS.

As for why the jump to 11 now?
One, Steve is no longer there to insist on staying with X (they may never have replaced OS X with MacOS).
Two, why not? Being the first version to support their custom silicon is a pretty big moment and worthy of incrementing the major version; although, I agree it also would have made sense to do so for the PPC -> Intel transition or the rename of OS X to Mac OS or even the Catalina release since it separated the system files.

Personally, I was more bothered by the rename to Mac OS than the version bump.

I still have a T-Shirt I got at the 1 Infinite Loop corporate store that says "The Joys of OS X". They can rename the OS, but I'm keeping the shirt.
 
verdi1987 said:
I worked for a software company where the marketing department made us change a .0 release to .1 because they felt customers were apprehensive about upgrading to a .0 release.
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There is some truth to that, many consider .0 releases something just out of beta, and still prone to bugs. Typical commercial users will wait and see. But jumping straight to ex. 2.1 instead of 2.0 will likely defeat the purpose, those user are usually smarter than that in my mind.
 
xWhiplash said:
Why wouldn't it be version 11? This will be the first macOS to support ARM. I think that alone classifies as 11 don't you?
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OS X has been running on ARM since 2005 at least... let’s not forget that iOS, tvOS etc. are all forks of OS X in the first place.

Ultimately, version number is just a decision. We shouldn’t overinterpret it‘s meaning. Apple has streamlined the way it calls things, that’s all. The technical base however didn’t change.
 
Traverse said:
My only hold up with that is if macOS was going to increase incrementally each year, why not consolidated? I admit that macOS X to 11 makes more sense on it's own, but when you look at the big picture:
  • macOS 11
  • iOS 14 released along side new iPhone's running on the iPhone 12 with the A14 chip
  • iPadOS 14

Eventually all numbering systems fail and I wonder if Apple will really go into iOS 20 of if soon they'll just transition to names and the version number will only be used for developers or tech support.
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Using that argumentation, they might as well call everything '20, since that's the year they are released. A20 chip. macOS20, iPadOS20, Macbook 2020, etc. And I am pretty clear Apple don't want that, simply because all products will be available outside of 2020. Thus, they can never reach a 'perfect' naming scheme.

That being said, it wouldn't make any difference at all if you call the next release macOS 11 or macOS 14 or macOS Bahamas. It is still the same, and 3 years from now you'll have issues remembering what it was that macOS Bahamas was anyway, so it is essentially a minor issue.

Edit: Man what a ramble I just wrote up. :p
 
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think it is, alot changes under the hood also, for example the support of ARM processors and intels in same OS
 
leman said:
OS X has been running on ARM since 2005 at least... let’s not forget that iOS, tvOS etc. are all forks of OS X in the first place.

Ultimately, version number is just a decision. We shouldn’t overinterpret it‘s meaning. Apple has streamlined the way it calls things, that’s all. The technical base however didn’t change.
Click to expand...
Sorry I should have been more clear. Not ARM, but Apple specific Silicon. This is different than the PowerPC days. These will be Apple’s own chips. That can do more stuff like image processing.
 
As far as underlying technologies go, previous updates have been a lot more significant. Big Sur is essentially a slight visual update and a major Safari upgrade. Version number doesn't really matter since Apple isn't advertising it.
 
What's in a number anyway?! I wasn't a Mac-user around the time OS 9 was put to rest in a coffin - but, I also don't remember any discussion in the wake of that addressing the OS 9 vs OS X and what it all means because some things are taken out and in turn a number of things is put in.

Firefox is turning 80.0 and it's the same POS browser on macOS it's always been. I shalt not comment on macOS 11 Big Sur as a whole. I can say that my pea sized brain wasn't understanding what I was being offered with macOS 11. I hope I can grow to at least have a walnut sized brain soon.
 
Well, as far as I can tell it is a visual upgrade that is successful in some areas but a total failure in others, along with a big Safari upgrade. However, if they don't fix Spotlight Search it won't be worthy of being installed on my machine. ;)
 
decisions said:
Well, as far as I can tell it is a visual upgrade that is successful in some areas but a total failure in others, along with a big Safari upgrade. However, if they don't fix Spotlight Search it won't be worthy of being installed on my machine. ;)
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What's your Spotlight issue? Aside from having to hit alt-enter to get full Spotlight for every search it works fine for me. I don't get why they start it out in a limited functionality state when you launch it, but it isn't too big a deal to me
 
casperes1996 said:
What's your Spotlight issue? Aside from having to hit alt-enter to get full Spotlight for every search it works fine for me. I don't get why they start it out in a limited functionality state when you launch it, but it isn't too big a deal to me
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I posted about it in a different thread, this is what I said:

"On Public Beta 5 now.

Has anyone else found Spotlight Search to be a bit messed up on Big Sur? Instead of searching for whatever I've typed immediately, it only loads Top Hits and then I have to scroll down to the suggestions and actually search for the term, which seems to be an unnecessary step that I don't recall existing before.

Then, it just doesn't seem to find what I want half the time. For instance, if I type in "Music" the only way to get to the Music folder in my home directory is by typing in the word Music, clicking to perform the step mentioned above, scrolling down through the search results (which for some reason has prioritized folders containing the string "music" and other words over folders that are just called "Music"), clicking "Search in Finder" and then finding it among a long list of items. Well, it would've been faster to just open Finder and then search from there if I'm going to have to do it anyway!

I never recall this happening on Catalina. Spotlight Search almost always found what I was looking for extremely quickly, and I would only open Finder to manage files or deal with multiple files, never to actually "find" something.

Am I crazy or did Spotlight get downgraded?"

Here I was wondering if I wasn't just imagining that Spotlight used to work better. However after downgrading back to Catalina I had my suspicions confirmed. All I have to do is open spotlight, type "Music" and bam the folder is right there in my results.
 
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