Apple rebrands OS X as 'macOS,' taps upgrade as 'Sierra'
Apple today recast OS X as macOS, a name that harked back two decades.
"OS X has been with us for over 15 years," said Craig Federighi, the Apple executive who leads Mac and iOS development, during Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote. "But we thought there would be a name so much cleaner and so much more elegant."
The rebranding will put the Mac's operating system more in sync with the nomenclature of Apple's other OSes, including iOS, tvOS and watchOS.
But macOS wasn't out of the blue: Apple used a variation -- Mac OS -- between 1995 and 1997, when it licensed third-party OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to build and sell Mac clones. (Co-founder Steve Jobs ended that strategy shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997.) Apple retained U.S. trademark rights to Mac OS; those rights were last renewed in 2015.
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