The Mac OS X Public Beta (internally

code name A code name, 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 industrial c ...

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

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

's Mac OS X (now named macOS)

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

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 long-awaited "next-generation Mac operating system" after the Copland failure. It allowed

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

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 operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

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 may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film * ''Next'' (1990 film), an animated short about William Shakespeare * ''Next'' (2007 film), a sci-fi film starring Nicolas Cage * '' Next: A Primer on Urban Painting'', a 2005 documentary film Lit ...

OPENSTEP OpenStep is a defunct object-oriented application programming interface (API) specification for a legacy object-oriented operating system, with the basic goal of offering a NeXTSTEP-like environment on non-NeXTSTEP operating systems. OpenStep wa ...

-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 Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. Th ...

'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 menu 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, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most c ...

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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Darwin Darwin may refer to: Common meanings * Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist and writer, best known as the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection * Darwin, Northern Territory, a territorial capital city i ...

1.2.1 core, including two features that Mac users and developers had been anticipating for almost a decade: preemptive multitasking and protected memory. To illustrate the benefits of the latter, at the

MacWorld Expo Macworld/iWorld was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Conference & Expos ...

in June 2000, Apple CEO

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; ...

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, 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 and Terminal. Also included with the Public Beta, but not in any subsequent versions of Mac OS X, were a simple MP3 player ( iTunes 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 atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical ...

, and HTMLEdit, a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

HTML editor inherited from

WebObjects WebObjects was a 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 prototyping tools. ...

. Native

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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 Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products. At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition ...

), 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 with the symbol C and atomic number 6. It is nonmetallic and tetravalent—its atom making four electrons available to form covalent chemical bonds. It belongs to group 14 of the periodic table. Carbon makes ...

API contrasted with the relative maturity of

Cocoa Cocoa may refer to: Chocolate * Chocolate * ''Theobroma cacao'', the cocoa tree * Cocoa bean, seed of ''Theobroma cacao'' * Chocolate liquor, or cocoa liquor, pure, liquid chocolate extracted from the cocoa bean, including both cocoa butter and ...

gave rise to an anti-Carbon bias among Mac OS X users.

Expiration

The Mac OS X Public Beta was expired on May 14, 2001; approximately two months after the release of Mac OS X 10.0, 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– IBM ...

-based Macintosh computers released after early 2001, nor on current Macintosh hardware, which uses the x86 or

ARM64 AArch64 or ARM64 is the 64-bit extension of the ARM architecture family. It was first introduced with the Armv8-A architecture. Arm releases a new extension every year. ARMv8.x and ARMv9.x extensions and features Announced in October 2011, ...

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