macOS is a family of operating systems developed by the American company Apple.
macOS X, later rebranded as macOS, is a Unix-like operating system. It is proprietary software based on Darwin OS, that uses the XNU kernel, that is based on Mach.
Do not confuse macOS X or modern macOS with Classic Mac OS.
macOS Versions
- Classic Mac OS
- macOS X
- Jaguar
- Panther
- Tiger
- Leopard
- Snow Leopard
- Lion
- Mountain Lions
- Mavericks
- Yosemite
- El Capitan
- Sierra
- High Sierra
- Mojave
- Catalina
- Big Sur
- Monterrey
- Ventura
- Sonoma
- Sequoia
macOS File Systems
File systems used in macOS, from older to newer:
- HFS
- HFS+
- APFS
macOS X
Carbon was one of two primary C-based application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by Apple for the macOS X.
Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS. Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for its desktop operating system macOS.
Aqua is the name of macOS X user interface.
macOS package manager
macOS package managers:
- brew
- MacPorts
brew
brew checks that Command Line Tools (CLT) are updated.
MacPorts
MacPorts usually supports older versions than brew. It can be an alternative when brew stops supporting the system’s macOS version.