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Available in October 2014, OS X Yosemite ushered in a brand-new version of Aqua. Now much more in line with iOS, Yosemite featured a flat design and wide-ranging use of transparency. It came complete with both light and dark modes, the latter making the menu bar, Spotlight (and its new center-of-the-screen design) and Dock black. Yosemite used Helvetica Neue as its default system font, replacing Lucida Grande.

Many of Yosemite’s features made the Mac play better with its iOS cousins. Continuity meant a user could move between their Mac and iOS deices more seamlessly, while the new Today view in Notification Center made use of iOS-like widgets. Photos replaced both iPhoto and Aperture, and allowed users to sync their entire photo library with iCloud.

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The first OS X release to break from the cat names and take its name from a location in California, Mavericks shipped in October 2013 for free.

This version of Mac OS X includes several improvements designed to extend battery life for notebook users, including App Nap, compressed memory and timer coalescing. Finder gained tabs, and iBooks as well as Maps made their first appearance as system apps.

While Aqua retained many components from Mountain Lion, much of the skeuomorphic design from previous releases were stripped from Maverick’s user interface.

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Even though Lion was hailed as the “Back to the Mac” release, 2012’s Mountain Lion did even more to bring iOS features and concepts to the Mac. Game Center, Notes and Reminders all made it into this version of OS X. Address Book and iCal were re-named Contacts and Calendars for better … synergy, I guess.

Dictation made speech-to-text easier than ever on the Mac, and the inclusion of Notification Center gave users a centralized location to see and manage incoming notifications. Mountain Lion was also home to the first Messages beta, which brought iMessage to the Mac for the first time.

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First previewed at 2010’s “Back to the Mac” event, Lion was released in July 2011 as a download from the Mac App Store for $29. Lion could also be purchased from Apple on a USB stick for $69. It was the first release of OS X to require a 64-bit Intel processor.

The release brought many features from iOS to the Mac for the first time, such as the Apple Push Notification Service, the ability to Auto Save documents, emoji support, FaceTime, full-screen apps and Launchpad, an easy-to-use grid of apps not unlike the iOS homescreen.

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When asked which version of Mac OS X was the best, many Mac nerds will reply with Snow Leopard. Released in 2009 under the mantra “No New Features,” 10.6 did bring new things with it. Mail, iCal and Address Book were granted Microsoft Exchange integration, and as it was the first release to support only Intel Macs, the whole OS was smaller, shedding PowerPC code once and for all.

Snow Leopard laid the groundwork for future releases and included OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch to make computing with additional CPU cores and more powerful GPUs easier for developers. It is the last version to include Rosetta, which allowed PowerPC applications to run on Intel Macs. It cost just $29.

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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 after a lengthy development cycle that Apple said was slowed by the release of the original iPhone. When it did ship, Leopard was a major push forward for OS X.

Gone were the numerous window styles that had cropped up in the Panther and Tiger years. Every major application and window were now using a new gray appearance that gave the whole OS a more mature look. Beyond window styles, Leopard brought a new Dock, which included Stacks, a way to look into a folder stored in the Dock.

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When Apple released Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on April 29, 2005 for $129, it did so while taking big swings at Microsoft Windows. Tiger boasted features like Spotlight file search and more robust graphics APIs, as well as improved 64-bit support. With this release, Safari gained RSS support, Mail received a visual overhaul and PDF creation was made easier than ever thanks to a new button on the Print dialog box. Dashboard, a home for small web-based widgets was announced as well.

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Released in October 2003, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther cut off “Old World ROM” Macs like the beige Power Mac G3s and some early PowerBook G3 models. Many users worked their way around this with third-party tools that would trick the installer.

For their work, users were rewarded with a streamlined version of OS X with a revamped Finder (now clad in Brushed Metal, sadly), Fast User Switching, Exposé for window management, FileVault, Font Book and iChat AV, among other features and updates, including built-in Fax support.

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Released in August of 2002, Mac OS X 10.2 was, in a way, the first new release of Mac OS X to include a large number of new features, such as Address Book, iCal, iChat, as well as nerdier stuff like CUPS and Samba support and Rendezvous (renamed later to Bonjour). It sold for $129.

Sadly, the “Happy Mac” logo that appeared during the Macintosh startup sequence was replaced with a large grey Apple logo with this release.

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Mac OS X 10.1 was designed to address issues found in the initial release. While primarily focused on performance, Puma also introduced improved CD and DVD burning support as well as DVD playback and a new version of AppleScript with much better ties into system functionality.

Puma was part of a software update package that included Mac OS 9.2.1 and could be ordered on CD from Apple for $19.95. Customers could pick up the upgrade CD for free in Apple Stores and Mac resellers, bypassing the shipping charge. It was released in September 2001, right before the release of the original iPod.

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Mac OS X 10.0, dubbed “Cheetah” went on sale for $129 on March 24, 2001. It brought the Aqua user interface and technology like preemptive multitasking and protected memory to a wider audience than the Public Beta.

Cheetah required 128 MB of RAM, which seems meager today, but was more than most Mac users had in their systems at the time. Even machines that surpassed the system requirements ran slowly under Mac OS X, which was the number one complaint of users about the release.

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In September 2000, Mac users could get a taste of the future with the Mac OS X Public Beta. For sale for $29, the release was plagued with problems, but showed off the Aqua interface and the marriage of NeXT’s technology with the classic Mac OS. It features several applications that didn’t ship as part of Mac OS X, including HTMLEditor, Sketch and Music Player.

This release also features an Apple logo centered in the menu bar. The logo didn’t serve any interactive function in the user interface, and the OS X team quickly put the Apple menu back in its rightful place, letting it take over many functions found in the “Special” menu.

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