Maintaining the "OS X" name forced them to stay with release 10.n way too long. Letter "X" stopped being cool many years ago (OS X, XP, XBox, Xwhatever).
Dayglored predicts "MacOS 11.0" within a year.
And BTW, whatever happened to the idea that the Mac and the iDevices would be running the same OS? Granted they're from a similar codebase under the hood, but did the merging into "One OS To Rule Them All" concept sort of go away?
That certainly would be consistent with the article:Apple is mostly likely to announce any name change at its Worldwide Developer Conference in early June, and launch a new Mac operating system later in the year.. . . but after fifteen years of 10.x it will certainly be interesting to learn what Apple would consider enough of a paradigm shift to justify switching from 10.x to 11.0.If they are going to make that switch for what is for them a nominal refresh like going from, say, OS 10.5 to OS 10.6, you might wonder about their retroactively renaming past 10.x releases to MacOS 11, 12, and so on. And naming the next release MacOS 20.0, perhaps.
Hey, Microsoft skipped Win 9.0 . . .
I think the idea was to move the devices toward each other, but not all the way to the convergence point. Windows 8 is a prime example of what happens when you try to force a touch interface onto a keyboard-and-pointer operating system. It was nigh-unusable until 8.1 made it merely awful.
If they do converge to a single OS, I'd expect it to work a lot like -- and bear with me on this -- Windows 10. I have it on my desktop at work and on a Boot Camp partition on my Macbook Pro, and it's by far the most Maclike Windows to date. When you're using it as a desktop OS, the touch stuff stays nicely out of the way. You can run tablet apps on a desktop or vise versa if you must, but they don't force it.
There are some iOS apps I'd like to run in a window on my Mac, kind of like Dashboard widgets (which I thought were a nifty idea when they were first introduced, but I haven't used in years. I just pick up my phone.)