Apple’s Mac announcements at the opening of its Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) yesterday were very positive, although perhaps not quite as exciting as many would have wished. As I had suspected back in early April, Apple opted for consistency in renaming what now used to be OS X to macOS, in line with iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The name for macOS 10.12, Sierra, is but part of a bigger story.

Apple did not officially name its system software releases until what was then Mac OS X 10.0. Prior to that, Classic Mac OS versions had a number of different internal names, which were little-used outside Apple. Before System 7.5, these usually involved stars or constellations; from System 7.5 (Mozart) to 9.1 (Fortissimo), internal names became more formalised, and were mostly based on music, with a few exceptions such as 8.6 (Veronica).

Mac OS X brought official names based on species of big cats, starting with Cheetah (10.0) and ending with Mountain Lion (10.8). Apple then switched to use locations with strong Californian and outdoor connections: Mavericks (10.9) is a Northern Californian surfing location known for its huge waves, particularly in the winter. It in turn was named after the dog belonging to one of its pioneer surfers.

Yosemite (10.10) is one of America’s most spectacular National Parks, in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, known worldwide for its hiking and massive rock wall climbing. El Capitan (Spanish for the captain or chief) (10.11) is one of the most spectacular rock walls in Yosemite National Park, providing almost a kilometer (3,000 feet) of sheer vertical ascent from the valley floor.

Sierra (Spanish for mountain range) most likely refers to the Sierra Nevada, a major mountain range between the Central Valley of California and the Basin and Range Province further inland in Nevada. It includes Yosemite National Park, the popular high-altitude lake resort of Lake Tahoe, and Mount Whitney – at 4,421 m the highest point in the contiguous US.

We can expect to see macOS Sierra this autumn/fall. I sincerely hope that Apple still intends devoting sufficient resources to fix the sporadic freezing which continues to affect many models of Mac, and that will be addressed in an update in the near future. Mac OS X and OS X have had a long haul to become extremely hard to crash or freeze, and El Capitan 10.11.4 and 10.11.5 are undoing that reputation every day. I am not sure that I can face these freezes every 3-5 days until Sierra ships.

The rebranding to macOS, and dropping of the X, is an important step, as it prepares the version numbering system to accommodate macOS 11. When that will happen is of course one of Apple’s deepest secrets.

There were many other important announcements at WWDC, but one exciting innovation coming to iPads soon will be a Swift programming playground. This will not allow software development on an iPad (honestly, no one really wants that, even if it could be done securely), but should be an excellent way to learn Swift, and to develop Swift code which can then be incorporated into a project in Xcode, running on a Mac. As I have written before, Apple is not dropping the Mac, nor is it converging macOS to merge with iOS. Macs are still needed to do many tasks that are inconceivable on iOS devices.

In case you want a quick reference, here are the internal names for later versions of Classic Mac OS:

• 7.0 Blue, Big Bang, M80, Pleiades
• 7.1 Cube-E, I Tripoli
• 7.5 Mozart, Capone
• 7.6 Harmony
• 8.0 Tempo
• 8.1 Scimitar, Bride of Buster
• 8.5 Allegro
• 8.5.1 The Ric Ford Release
• 8.6 Veronica
• 9.0 Sonata
• 9.0.4 Minuet
• 9.1 Fortissimo
• 9.2 Moonlight
• 9.2.1 Limelight

Here are the names for the big cats cycle of Mac OS X:

• 10.0 Cheetah
• 10.1 Puma
• 10.2 Jaguar
• 10.3 Panther
• 10.4 Tiger
• 10.5 Leopard
• 10.6 Snow Leopard
• 10.7 Lion
• 10.8 Mountain Lion

Finally, here are the names for recent major versions of OS X and macOS:

• 10.9 Mavericks
• 10.10 Yosemite
• 10.11 El Capitan
• 10.12 Sierra