Mac OS X (idea)

Mac OS X was officially released on March 24, 2001, as announced at MacWorld San Francisco 2001. Mac OS X 10.1 was released on September 28th, bringing great improvements which brought the OS, in my opinion and that of many others, to a level where it is ready to be used as one's full-time OS. The retail price is $129. Mac OS X is now shipped with all new Macs as of MacWorld 2002 in January.

Improvements of Mac OS X 10.0 over the beta version included:

• The return of the Apple Menu!
• Improved speed
• Better reliability and performance in the Classic environment
• Boot times improved
• File copying is faster
• New Altivec optimization
• The Finder is now much more Mac OS 9-like
• Airport, Location Manager, and many others all supported

Improvements of Mac OS X 10.1 over 10.0 include:

• Greatly improved speed, especially with respect to application launches and window resizing. Almost as fast as Mac OS 9.
• DVD support (finally)
• iTunes: Apple version of SoundJam, MP3 player and Audio CD burner
• CD burning integrated into the Finder
• "Menu Extras": controls such as for volume, AirPort, networking, &c., as well as battery level display and a clock (digital or analog) in the menu bar on the right side, to avoid taking up space in the Dock
• Dock customization: can be placed at bottom or on left or right sides of screen
• Greatly reduced power drain during sleep on laptops, which was a significant problem under 10.0

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Sources: MacOSrumors.com, Apple.com