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Comment by zauguin | Hacker News Reader

Take macOS. It moved from "Mac OS X" over "OS X" to "macOS" which was (AFAICT) purely a "random" surface level change (especially with the "remove Mac only to reintroduce it later and remove the X instead" move), even though "Mac OS X" was a rather well established brand.

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I can kinda understand the desire to simplify it to "macOS". Through the years it was

- System 1,2,3,4,5,6,7

- Mac OS 8

- Mac OS 9

- Mac OS X

And it remained at "X" for about 16 years, with sometimes substantial releases being distinguished just by a big cat name or a decimal point. Arguably the "X" part stopped being part of the versioning, and simply became part of the brand but it was definitely redundant and "mac oh-ess-ex" is at best a bit clunky to say.

It certainly wasn't necessary, but I can at least understand why they'd want to do it.

It’s technically pronounced OS “ten”.

Being version “10” for fifteen years is kinda stupid, though. It’s the same problem Linux had with being on version 2.6, seemingly forever.

Yeah it probably is, I'd be interested to see how many people use that pronunciation though

"Mac OS X" is so well established that the official IRC channel won't change the name to "macOS" and instead uses #MacOSX as the channel name.

I don’t think it was all that well established. For one thing, people didn’t know whether to say “X” or “10.”

macOS also aligns with capitalization of iOS, which is the more widespread brand.

Mac OS X was a product line name among others, and product lines come and go. It’s also a brand, but nothing compared to a company brand.

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