Apple shortened the name to 'OS X' in 2012 and then changed it to 'macOS' in 2016 to align with the branding of Apple's other operating systems, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. After sixteen distinct versions of macOS 10, macOS Big Sur was presented as version 11 in 2020, and macOS Monterey was presented as version 12 in 2021. MacOS has supported three major processor architectures, beginning with PowerPC-based Macs in 1999. In 2006, Apple transitioned to the Intel architecture with a line of Macs using Intel Core processors.

Simplified history of Unix-like operating systems In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on the latest Macintosh computers. The heritage of what would become macOS had originated at NeXT, a company founded by Steve Jobs following his departure from Apple in 1985. There, the Unix-like NeXTSTEP operating system was developed, before being launched in 1989.

The kernel of NeXTSTEP is based upon the Mach kernel, which was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University, with additional kernel layers and low-level user space code derived from parts of BSD. Its graphical user interface was built on top of an object-oriented GUI toolkit using the Objective-C programming language. Throughout the early 1990s, Apple had tried to create a 'next-generation' OS to succeed its classic Mac OS through the Taligent, Copland and Gershwin projects, but all were eventually abandoned.

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