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Comment by TwiceCubed | Hacker News Reader

You're confidently incorrect. If you weren't paying attention at the time, it's literally in the first sentence of the Wikipedia article. This isn't hard to check.

"OS X" was the official name for five years, from 2011-2016. It wasn't short for anything. The "Mac" prefix had been officially removed from it for that time.

This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up.

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I disagree with Wikipedia's framing. There wasn't some sort of major rebrand in 2011, Apple just stopped writing "Mac" at the start of the name. Old-timers knew what it stood for.

It's like how "Mac" is still short for "Macintosh", even though Apple basically never uses the full name anymore.

Apple made a pretty big deal about all the rebrands. From "System" (verions 1-7), to "Mac OS" (8 and 9), to "Mac OS X" (10.0-10.7), to "OS X" (10.8-10.12), to "macOS" (10.13+).

It was clear that the OS wasn't thought of as a separate thing in the early days. The latest one looks like a typo.

Indeed, you can see between 2011 and 2012 (for example) that Apple's PR site changed from calling it "Mac OS X" to simply calling it "OS X".

2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20111130104524/http://www.apple....

2012: https://web.archive.org/web/20120222083925/http://www.apple....

Interestingly Lion was called "Mac OS X Lion" upon release[0], but then their website[1] called it "OS X Lion" predominantly.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/07/20Mac-OS-X-Lion-Avail...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110705041542/http://www.apple....

2012 link is the same as the 2011 link.

Actual 2012 link: https://web.archive.org/web/20121207053101/http://www.apple....

Woops, copy/paste struggles! Thanks, updated my 2012 link while I was still able to edit.

They didn't "just stop writing it" in some contexts. They started registering trademarks that explicitly didn't include it, and then they went back.

The trademark for "OS X" on its own was approved in November 2011, and then Apple started using it on its own. Their other trademark registrations (e.g. USPTO TM SN 86097345 OS X Mavericks) continued in that form, until their registration for "macOS" was approved and they changed back (e.g. USPTO TM SN 87534929 macOS High Sierra).

You can have your etymology and your opinion, but as far as Apple and the government are concerned, the fact is that the official name was just "OS X". Wikipedia is correct, and this was also the understanding among Apple fans at the time.

Thanks for the correction.

Deleted.

Your memory is incorrect. The branding sequence was System (from before I remember up to 7.5) -> Mac OS (7.6 to 9) -> Mac OS X (10.0 to ??) -> OS X (??) -> macOS (starting after 2015). Edit: Sibling comment from htimsenyawed looks right to me.

macOS was originally Mac OS X and short referenced as OS X. The official name change from Mac OS X to macOS began with release 10.12 Sierra, the previous version was called Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The transition to macOS from Mac OS X occurred in 2016 as that was the year that Sierra was announced and released.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as OS X, is in fact, Mac OS X, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, macOS.

Also, and I'm not sure if I remember that correctly, I think during "Mac OS X" times they said it is pronounced as "mac OS ten", because X is the roman numeral for 10.

Wikipedia has references about it where Apple themselves even back then used either pronunciation, though. Also a reference that says while it stands for 10 it also references the X commonly found in many Unix things because of the Unix roots of Mac OS X.

You’re missing the intermediate transition to “OS X”

It was released as "Mac OS X", and then later shortened/rebranded to just "OS X". Unless you want to argue that the etymology of "OS X" is completely unrelated to "Mac OS X" and is merely coincidentally very similar, the statement "OS X was short for Mac OS X" is correct by all but the most pedantic definition.

A rare inverted confidentally incorrect, when someone claims (incorrectly and with great confidence) that someone else is confidently incorrect.

> This reminds me of when my grade school teacher kept trying to insist that my friend, named Alex, was actually named Alexander. I think he originally brought in a copy of his birth certificate to shut them up.

This is like telling someone who is called Louis that his actual name is Hlodowig.

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