The change was pretty much evident if one took a look at pictures of WWDC banners from 2006 and 2007

and compared them to the new 2008 ones featuring both the Mac and iPhone operating systems

This was clearly done to unify the branding since the OS was now running on a wide gamut of devices that included not only desktops and portables but also mobiles and the Apple TV set-top.

The change was also evident in a press release in May referring to the Developers’ Conference.

Altough the title “Apple Executives to Showcase Mac OS X Leopard and OS X iPhone Development Platforms at WWDC 2008 Keynote” still featured a distinction in the following text one could read

This year’s WWDC will showcase two revolutionary development platforms, the ground-breaking innovations of OS X Leopard® and OS X iPhone™, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.

and also

WWDC 2008 will offer over 150 information-rich sessions and labs where Apple engineers will go in-depth on the innovative technologies that power OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard.

On the other hand the footer stating that:

Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications.

had been already Mac-less at least since the 7th July of 2004.

Mac OS 9 had multiple users, Voiceprint password, Keychain, automatic updating, encryption, Internet File Sharing, Internet AppleScript, and Network Browser. Many of these were direct equivalents of Mac OS X features which were concurrently developed or even backported.

The reason was of course to make the Mac OS more powerful and more modern but also to ease the transition to OS X, which at the time was believed to start in less than an year

Image taken from Toastytech.com

While in 2007 the number of active users of Apple’s operating system was at 25 millions in 2009 it had suddenly risen to 75 million. How could this be?

The secret to Apple’s tripling its active user base in the past two years is the runaway success of the iPhone platform. During the keynote presentation Schiller produced a chart showing the number of actual active OS X users, not just of Mac OS X users. It’s very important to strike the difference between those two terms: OS X and Mac OS X.

The growth isn’t just about Macs but it ows a lot to the many iPhones and iPod touchs sold so far, to be exact around 40 millions of the devices. Both have a version of the former Mac OS X and of its technologies and have thus incremented the market share of Apple’s operating system and key programs such as the web browser Safari.

The next one, Mac OS X 10.4, codename Tiger, was not to follow the “one major release per year” rule kept in the past years and would be closer -in development and release- to a 20 month cycle.

Let’s take a look at the schedule Apple actually kept since march of 2001, when (not counting the public beta) the first version of Mac OS X was released to the public:

• 10.0 CHEETAH – Date of release: 24 March 2001
• 10.1 PUMA – Date of release: 25 September 2001
• 10.2 JAGUAR – Date of release: 23 August 2002
• 10.3 PANTHER – Date of release: 24 October 2003
• 10.4 TIGER – Date of release: 29 April 2005
• 10.5 LEOPARD – Date of release: 26 October 2007

The dates show us that it took only 6 months to go from 10.0 to 10.1 and that 10.2 was released the following year: this reinforces the common opinion of “Puma” as a quick and much-needed fix for a still incomplete and immature operating system. So we have 11 months between “Puma and “Jaguar” and 14 months until “Panther”.

Mac OS X 10.4, “Tiger”, was released after 18 months, more or less as stated by Tevanian. On the other hand it took 30 months for “Leopard” to come out and the wait for 10.6, codenamed “Snow Leopard”, could be in the same ballpark.
Apple has stated it will show and give an almost complete “developer release” of 10.6 at the 2009 WWDC which means the sixth version of Mac OS X won’t come out before 24 monthts: maybe even a bit longer if we take into account Apple’s fondness of releasing during Autumn or Spring.

The picture of Avie Tevanian (from the 1999 WWDC) is “courtesy of Apple”.

While the product was actually released more than an year after, on the 5th of April 2000, the move signalled a big change for Apple, which openly embraced the open source movement after the false start of MkLinux a few years before.

The announcement of Darwin (and of an open source version of QuickTime Streaming Server) was closely related to the the first version of Apple’s NeXT generation operating system, Mac OS X Server, announced in January at Macworld.

So in March, just a few days apart, Apple shipped both its new server operating system and at the same time released freely many of its core foundations.

Darwin’s birth and Apple’s push into the open and free world were initially met with mixed reaction, with many people not knowing whether or not to trust Apple’s motives and the Apple Public Source License (APSL) chosen for the source code. The license was modified at least three times and only in 2003, after being already accepted by the Open Source Initiative as an “open source license” it also gained the “free software license” status by the more stern and orthodox Free Software Foundation.

The Cupertino company eventually began to get acceptance of its open efforts, adding through the years many projects such as Bonjour/Zeroconf, WebKit and Calendar Server to mainstays Darwin and Darwin Streaming Server enduring to this day a fruitful although occasionally rocky relationship with the open source community.

In the original press release it is stated that

Mac OS X is built on the high-performance Mach microkernel and BSD 4.4, and includes the Apache HTTP web server and WebObjects application server

which were all features coming from the adoption of NeXT’s operating system.
This evolution, which was called “Rhapsody”, was modified in the interface to resemble the Mac OS and also had the addition of new and old Apple technologies such as NetBoot and support for ColorSync and QuickTime.

Mac OS X Server required 64MB of RAM, a 1GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive and supported all Power Macintosh G3 systems but was specifically optimized (and marketed) for Apple’s new blue and white G3s, also announced at Macworld 1999.

The product actually shipped in march at a lower price, only USD 499, instead of the “estimated” 999 mentioned by Steve Jobs in January during his Keynote.

In may of that year a promotional video was released in which Steve Jobs showed off the first Apple Store: in the last part the camera pans on the aisles and we can take a look at the main software offerings from Apple, still a mix of classic product lines and solutions coming from the NeXT acquisition.

From left to right you can see boxes of Mac OS X 10.0, Mac OS 9, AppleWorks 6, Final Cut (Pro) 1.2.5, AppleShare IP, AppleCare while in the lower part are Apple Media (blank) CDs and WebObjects 5.