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empath75

I think it's half funny because of the 'high' and half funny because it's just a really lazy naming scheme.

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It's in keeping with their "Tick-Tock" naming since Snow Leopard:

Leopard (Tick) -> SnowLeopard (Tock)

Lion -> Mountain Lion

Mavericks -> ...(uuhhh...whoops?)

Yosemite -> El Capitan

Sierra -> High Sierra

Mavericks was a work-in-progress shitshow of a release, that's probably why it never got a "tock". Apple was keen to let people forget.

I think they missed a trick by not naming Mavericks as Los Gatos, which is a suburb quite close to Cupertino and has some connections to Apple.

Los Gatos translates as "The Cats" so it seems like it would have been a nice way to end the big cat naming scheme.

And put a suburb photo on a wallpaper?

Imagine it: http://www.mijusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Los-Gatos.j... :D

Mavericks was when OS X/macOS became free (as in no $$ to update to.)

It'd be fine if it were actually consistent and they picked different locations. But 'High Sierra' is a region, 'Yosemite' is a park in that region and 'El Capitan' is a large rock in that park (side note...a large rock that was climbed without ropes this weekend...Alex Honnold is both insane and a huge inspiration). They've essentially made the last three releases about the same place. It's lazy and inconsistent. And it's not like there's a shortage of exquisite places in California. Big Sur, Shasta, Lassen, Mendocino, Lost Coast, San Simeon, Joshua Tree, Catalina, Monterrey Bay...just off the top of my head, I've named 9 better California places that they could have used for their releases.

It'd also be kinda funny for them to jab at Microsoft's advertising and have an OS X Mojave, since it would fit with their naming scheme.

Some of those names I recognise from other IT-related products (Mendocino, Catalina, Monterey...). Generally speaking, naming products after CA landmarks has been done for 30+ years in this industry, it just feels very unoriginal. I think it's a desperate attempt from Apple to remind you (or themselves) that they "design in California", despite manufacturing in China, selling in Europe, and stashing profits in Bermuda; and to suggest the OS is "hard as a rock", as opposed to the wobbly and airy "windows".

I very much preferred the big-cats theme. It humanised the OS in powerful ways, making it an extremely powerful and very intelligent animal that dominates through speed and elegance. Rocks are just dumb and static.

Advocate here; rocks are quite dynamic on geologic timescales. Also, I don't think it really makes sense to call them dumb, as that is a quality one would apply to something with a central nervous system and capacity to self-identify in conjunction with capacity for intelligence.

We know that rocks don't have a CNS; if they can self-identify the mechanism for this and their experience is obviously quite alien to our own so it doesn't make much sense to project human qualities onto them without more information.

It is true that the qualities of rocks are quite different than those of large felines.

Place > Park > Region seems pretty consistent to me, shows a sense of relationship between the different versions and that they are closely linked together rather than being entirely different

How is it any different from the large cat naming theme?

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