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SubscribeWill Apple's OS X be stopping at 10.6?
Being a bit of a Mac fan, I casually mentioned to my wife the upcoming (and generally eagerly awaited) Macworld conference. I then went on to mention that I'll be buying Leopard when it comes out.
Julie's response: Didn't you buy it last year?
Me: No, that was Tiger.
Julie: How many big cats are there?
Good point!
Leopard is due out this spring, so I popped over to Wikipedia to see what big cats had been used by Apple so far:
- Mac OS X 10.0 - Cheetah
- Mac OS X 10.1 - Puma
- Mac OS X 10.2 - Jaguar
- Mac OS X 10.3 - Panther
- Mac OS X 10.4 - Tiger
- Mac OS X 10.5 - Leopard
By my reckoning (and little more Wikipedia browsing), the only big cat left is the Lion.
There are others: the Snow Leopard and Clouded Leopard - but I ruled them out because, well, we're going have Leopard this year...and we don't want to repeat do we?
There's also an Onza, but a) I'm not sure very many people will realise this is (supposed to be) classed as a big cat, and b)
Texas Tech University researchers concluded that the onza is most likely a genetic variant of puma, but not a distinct cat species
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onza
So, all in all it sounds like Lion should be next, and then...what? The end of OS X? The end of big kitty codenames?
I think some cat loving Apple employee might just be foregoing his next Christmas bonus! I can here them now...[cue fantasy sequence]...
What do you mean there's no more big cats left? What did you think we would do a "Microsoft Word" and just make the numbers up? †
† i.e. MS Word 1, 2, 6, 7, 8...etc.
Either way - I'm looking forward to what Apple can pull out of the bag.
Oh, and just to cover myself here, obviously this is all a bit tongue in cheek! 
You should follow me on Twitter here I'll tweet about JavaScript, HTML 5 and other such gems (amongst usual tweet-splurges)
%7Cutmcsr%3D(direct)%7Cutmcmd%3D(none)%3B%2B__utmv%3D85926320.-%3B)
I know this is a pretty old post.. but Snow Leopard contains minor updates, and 10.7 (unconfirmed, but still exciting to rumor about) codenamed 'Sabertooth', is expected, at least right now, to move to cloud computing. Wouldn't surprise me one bit, as Apple almost always revolutionizes the computer, software, and OS industry with any new product they release. Apple is nothing short of a deity, and we all know it.
What about a Lynx?
"as Apple almost always revolutionizes the computer, software, and OS industry with any new product they release. Apple is nothing short of a deity, and we all know it."
What???
Sabertooth is a good idea, or seven lives cat would be meaningful, but i don´t like the order of big cats, since a tiger is bigger than a leopard, and a jaguar too is bigger than any leopard incluiding a panther... Apple should get advice from zoologists...
A lion would be a dead end cat...
what about osx kitty as they may not always use big cats so what about everyones favourite feline the domestic cat
There still are some options left:
Cougar, Lion, Lynx
There is NO WAY 10.7 is going to be cloud-based. The original article was a joke that was taken way too seriously.
Our current wireless infrastructure is too slow to handle cloud-based computing. AT&T was barely able to launch MMS capabilities for the iPhone this year and that's just transferring small media files.
Cloud-based computing means that everything has to be done over the internet on the hosts servers and my opinion is that the majority of Mac users are not going to pay Apple a monthly fee to use a computer.
what about lynx
I like ninja cat...