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Comment by dindresto | Hacker News Reader

To the people downvoting this comment: By saying that 11 is what 10 was to Mac OS 9 implies the same substantial changes made to the whole system which is not the case here, at all. Mac OS 10 / OS X / macOS was a completely new system based on NeXTSTEP (or at least, completely different from Mac OS 9). It is still the same operating system, just in the usual upgraded fashion (although this time with more visual changes). By dropping the 10, Apple would have stated that macOS is just considered the successor to Mac OS (9) and the previous major "10" is already implied by the name. The 11 just makes no sense considering there has already been an 11th OS X.

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https://twitter.com/peternlewis/status/1276777600027750400?s...

> By saying that 11 is what 10 was to Mac OS 9 implies the same substantial changes made to the whole system which is not the case here, at all.

This is not a rational metric for what a "full version tick" should look like. OS X was arguably a different operating system than Mac OS 9. If that was the bar to cross, Linux would still be 1.xx.xx and Windows would be Windows 3.xxx.

Considering they had a major break in backwards compatibility last year when they dropped 32 bit support, that was arguably the better year to do a major version tick.

On the other hand, MacOS 7.6 to MacOS 8 was not much more than a rebadging and a few bundled widgets. 9->X was a once-in-a-lifetime architectural change and not historically typical of Mac system software major versions.

Then again how does this differ from the mostly incremental updates 2 through 9? They had a naming strategy, changed it, and now seemingly reverted to the old one. I don't understand your reasoning.

I think the 11 is being justified as "supporting ARM64", but given 10.0 supported PowerPC, it does seem dubious.

I think it makes sense, considering arm macs will run iOS apps as more-or-less first class native citizens, it's a whole new native subsystem (and not just a catalyst shim)

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