Though the number of new APIs introduced in Lion may fall short of the landmark Tiger and Leopard releases, the most important changes in Lion are radical accelerations of past trends. Still, this is the most significant release of Mac OS X in many years-perhaps the most significant release ever. Apple pegs Lion at 250+ new features, which doesn't quite match the 300 touted for Leopard, but I guess it all depends on what you consider a 'feature' (and what that '+' is supposed to mean). Let's put aside the pessimistic prognostication for now and consider Lion as a product, not a portent. At the very least, it seems like the end of the big cat branding-after all, where can you go after Lion? Is this process of taking the best from iOS and bringing it back to the Mac platform just the first phase of a complete assimilation? Is Lion the end of the line for Mac OS X itself? In this context, the name Lion starts to take on darker connotations. Despite plausible official explanations, it was hard to shake the feeling that Apple's burgeoning mobile platform was stealing resources-not to mention the spotlight-from the Mac. No new features, concentrating instead on internal enhancements and bug fixes. Why bring the cat theme back to the forefront now? The public 'big cat' branding for Mac OS X only began with Jaguar code names for the two earlier versions were not well known outside the developer community and were certainly not part of Apple's official marketing message for those releases.

Such brief retrospectives are de rigueur at major Mac OS X announcements, but long-time Apple watchers might have felt a slight tingle this time. Instead, Steve Jobs simply called the new operating system 'a sneak peek at where we're going with Mac OS X.'īehind Jobs, the screen listed the seven previous major releases of Mac OS X: Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. The presentation was understated, especially compared to the bold rhetoric that accompanied the launches of the iPhone ('Apple reinvents the phone') and the iPad ('a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price'). Mac OS X 10.7 was first shown to the public in October 2010.

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