By Dan Moren for Macworld

March 29, 2021 5:22 AM PT

How macOS will still steer Apple for the next 20 years

I’ve been a Mac user for about 30 years. And hard as it is for me to believe, the vast majority of that time has been spent with the modern macOS (or OS X, or Mac OS X, if we’re getting historical). In an industry that tends to move as fast as technology, a consumer product remaining relevant over two decades—never mind the seventeen years the Classic Mac OS existed before it—is pretty rare.

Despite much consternation in the years since the introduction of the iPhone and the iPad, the Mac has still not been put out to pasture, forsaken in favor of its shinier new siblings. If anything, Apple’s longest running product line has gotten a new lease on life with the advent of Macs built on custom Apple silicon—at long last, truly turning the product into what it was always meant to be: a personal computer built, stem to stern, by Apple itself.

But even if Apple has assuaged most of its concerns about the future of Mac hardware, the platform’s most dedicated users have often found themselves wondering what exactly the future holds for their favorite operating system as it embarks upon its third decade.

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