Apple today announced that Mac OS X, the next generation Macintosh operating system, is complete and the ?gold master? has been released to manufacturing for production. Mac OS X will ship on March 24, 2001, for a suggested retail price of $129 (US). Mac OS X is the world?s most advanced operating system, combining the power and openness of UNIX with the legendary ease of use and broad applications base of Macintosh.
Mac OS X is built upon an incredibly stable, open source, UNIX based foundation called Darwin and features true memory protection, preemptive multi-tasking and symmetric multiprocessing when running on the dual processor Power Mac G4. Mac OS X includes Apple?s new Quartz 2D graphics engine (based on the Internet-standard Portable Document Format) for stunning graphics and broad font support; OpenGL for spectacular 3D graphics and gaming; and QuickTime for streaming audio and video. Mac OS X also features an entirely new user interface called Aqua. Aqua combines superior ease of use with amazing new functionality such as the Dock, a breakthrough for organizing applications, documents and document windows.
Mac OS X will be available through The Apple Store and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US) beginning March 24, 2001. Mac OS X will be preinstalled as the standard operating system on Macintosh computers beginning this summer.
Mac OS X requires a minimum of 128MB of memory and is designed to run on the following Apple products: iMac, iBook, Power Macintosh G3, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G4 Cube and PowerBook introduced after September 1998.
You can find more information about Mac OS X at the Apple Web site.