Apple, it’s time to move on from “OS X” | Hacker News Reader

Apple, it’s time to move on from “OS X”

medium.com

24 pointspavlov10 comments

The article describes a non solution to a non problem, with ridiculous BS like: "That’s a terrible way to brand a consumer product. It turns a harmless product name into a mild form of hazing: a new Mac user is bound to feel stupid at some point when the mistake gets corrected. Humiliating newbies is not to anyone’s benefit."

Yeah, it so much hurt OS X, which only got it 5x larger from 2% in the late nineties to 8-10% usa market share today, for what's essentially an expensive upmarket product.

The product with the market share is the Mac.

When Apple has such a powerful computer brand, isn't it weird that the Mac operating system is called something else and spelled in a way that nobody knows how to pronounce?

But the branding of the operating system doesn't really matter, because the operating system isn't a product that's sold on its own. The way you get a copy of OS X is by buying a Mac. So it's not really a problem if most people don't know its name, since they'll never be shopping for it anyway.

(The one exception is if you want to upgrade the OS on an existing Mac, but even then Apple has it covered; the only places where you can buy that upgrade are places staffed by trained salespeople, so you can just ask for "the newest OS for my Mac" and they'll know you mean OS X version whatever.)

Nobody buys OS X upgrades anymore. The last few have been free.

Mac OS X upgrades are only available from the MAS (Mac App Store) now.

"a new Mac user is bound to feel stupid at some point when the mistake gets corrected. Humiliating newbies is not to anyone’s benefit."

If you feel stupid or humiliated because some dickwad corrected your "Oh Ess Ex" you have more important problems in your life (and the dickwad too).

I'm pretty sure both pronunciations are acceptable.

Agreed. Don't really know anyone who would say you are wrong for calling it X vs. 10. There are more important things going on in the world. :)

True, but that hasn't stopped people from being extremely anal about similar things.

I've just never encountered anyone correcting OSX before I saw this post.

By the title I thought I'd hear some compelling arguments for Apple to ditch it's os and create a new one. I'm more of a Linux person myself but from what I'm reading osx could use some improvements. It turned out to be an article on semantics and pronunciations...

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