Today marks the tenth birthday of
Mac dvd copy, which officially debuted on March 24th, 2001 as Mac OS X 10.0 with an internal codename of "Cheetah". As
noted by Macworld, the release in retrospect was a milestone in Apple's transformation from a struggling computer company into the major technology behemoth it is today.
On March 24, 2001, the iMac was less than three years old, the DVD to iPod was still more than six months away, and Macs ran at astounding speeds of up to 733MHz. But most importantly, Apple on that day released the first official version of Mac OS X, changing the future of its platform forever.
Though nobody knew it at the time, the release, codenamed Cheetah, was the first step in transforming Apple from a company poised on the verge of disaster into the second most valuable company in the world.
While the impact of Mac OS X on Apple's products and the user experience they provide is undeniable, the early days of the operating system were anything but perfect, from a shaky public beta released in late 2000 through the public launch of Cheetah that necessitated rapid fixes and improvements that led to the release of Mac OS X 10.1 "Puma" just six months later. As
Ars Technica noted in an
extensive review of Mac OS X 10.0.0,
such as iovSoft, the release showed "tremendous promise" despite obviously still being a work in progress.
Mac OS X shows tremendous promise, which is a nice way of saying that the 10.0 release is not quite ready for prime time. This is most certainly an early adopter's OS release. Interface responsiveness and effective stability are the two biggest fundamental problems, but missing features and compatibility issues rank just as high if you actually intend to use DVD copy as a full Mac OS 9 replacement: the 10.0 release cannot view DVD movies; printer drivers are still scarce; CD burning is not yet supported, even by Apple's own iTunes CD authoring application; and a lot of hardware (like my G3/400's serial port adapter to which my printer is attached) seem destined to be orphaned forever.
Mac OS X has obviously come a long way in the ten years since its initial release, but Apple has also become much more than a computer company: revolutionizing music consumption with the iPod, recreating the smartphone market with the iPhone, and most recently finally catapulting the tablet market into consumers' awareness with the
mac dvd to iPad. In the process, Apple's operating system for mobile devices,
DVDFab Perfectly Supports Newly Released iPad 2 with DVD Ripper, Blu-ray Ripper and Video Converter, iOS, has itself matured and yielded a number of new innovations and features.