Mac OS X Public Beta (internally

code name A code name, codename, call sign, or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in ...

d "Kodiak") was the first publicly available version of

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

's Mac OS X (now named macOS)

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

to feature the Aqua user interface. It was released to the public on September 13, 2000, for US$ 29.95. Its release was significant as the first publicly available evidence of Apple's ability to ship the "next-generation Mac operating system" after the Copland failure. It allowed

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

s and early adopters to test a preview of the upcoming operating system and develop software for it before its final release. It is the only public version of

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

to have a code name not based on a big cat until the release of 10.9 Mavericks in 2013. The US version had a build number of 1H39 and the international version had build number 2E14.

Successor OS

The Public Beta succeeded Mac OS X Server 1.0, the first public release of Apple's new

NeXT NeXT, Inc. (later NeXT Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc.) was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later develope ...

OPENSTEP OpenStep is an object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification developed by NeXT. It provides a framework for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and developing software applications. OpenStep was designed to be plat ...

-based operating system, which used a variant of the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

's "Platinum" user interface look and feel. The Public Beta introduced the Aqua user interface to the world. Fundamental user interface changes were revealed with respect to fonts, the

Dock The word dock () in American English refers to one or a group of human-made structures that are involved in the handling of boats or ships (usually on or near a shore). In British English, the term is not used the same way as in American Engl ...

, the

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to the customer. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose, often with prices shown – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-est ...

bar (with an Apple logo at the center that was later repositioned to the left of the menu bar and made an active interface element). System

icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic Church, Catholic, and Lutheranism, Lutheran churches. The most common subjects include Jesus, Mary, mother of ...

s were much larger and more detailed, and new interface eye candy was prevalent.

Technical changes

The beta's arrival marked some fundamental technical changes, most courtesy of an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Darwin 1.2.1 core, including two features that Mac users and developers had been anticipating for almost a decade:

preemptive multitasking In computing, preemption is the act performed by an external scheduler — without assistance or cooperation from the task — of temporarily interrupting an executing task, with the intention of resuming it at a later time. This preemptive sc ...

and

protected memory Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern instruction set architectures and operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that h ...

. To illustrate the benefits of the latter, at the

MacWorld Expo Macworld/iWorld (originally Macworld) was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to Apple's Mac platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Con ...

in June 2000, Apple

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

demonstrated ''Bomb.app'', a test application intended to crash.

Native software

The Public Beta included many of the standard programs bundled with macOS for decades to come, such as

TextEdit TextEdit is an open-source software, open-source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with macOS since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application fo ...

, Preview,

Mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...

QuickTime Player QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

and Terminal. Also included with the Public Beta, but not in any subsequent versions of Mac OS X, were a simple MP3 player (

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

had not yet been introduced), Sketch, a basic vector drawing program demonstrating features of

Quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The Atom, atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen Tetrahedral molecular geometry, tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tet ...

, and HTMLEdit, a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

HTML editor inherited from

WebObjects WebObjects is a discontinued Java web application server and a server-based web application framework originally developed by NeXT Software, Inc. WebObject's hallmark features are its object-orientation, database connectivity, and prototy ...

. Native shrinkware applications were few and far between. Early adopters had to turn to

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

alternatives, giving rise to an active homebrew software community around the new operating system. Many programs in use on early Mac OS X systems were inherited from

or Rhapsody developer releases (e.g. OmniWeb or Fire), or were simple wrapper apps that provided a graphical interface to a command-line Unix program. The poor state of the

Carbon Carbon () is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalence, tetravalent—meaning that its atoms are able to form up to four covalent bonds due to its valence shell exhibiting 4 ...

API contrasted with the relative maturity of Cocoa gave rise to an anti-Carbon bias among Mac OS X users.

Expiration

The Mac OS X Public Beta expired on May 14, 2001; approximately two months after the release of

Mac OS X 10.0 Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It was released on March 24, 2001, for a price of $129 after a public beta. Mac OS X was Apple's successor to the classic Ma ...

, the completed version of the operating system released in March 2001. As a result, it will not run on later

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

-based Macintosh computers released after early 2001, nor on current Macintosh hardware, which uses the

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

ARM64 AArch64, also known as ARM64, is a 64-bit version of the ARM architecture family, a widely used set of computer processor designs. It was introduced in 2011 with the ARMv8 architecture and later became part of the ARMv9 series. AArch64 allows ...

processor architectures. Using the Mac OS X Public Beta on compatible equipment today requires setting the hardware clock to a date prior to the expiration date. The expiration date forced users to purchase a copy of the final release rather than continuing to use the Public Beta, as well as reassured industry observers skeptical after the Copland and Rhapsody failures that Apple would actually release a next-generation operating system this time. Owners of the Public Beta version were entitled to a $30 discount on the price of the first full version of Mac OS X 10.0. Only the Aqua GUI and related components of the Public Beta were subject to expiry; the underlying Darwin command-line based OS continued to function.

References

{{Apple Inc. 2000 software MacOS PowerPC operating systems