
The Big Sur coastline makes for an excellent background while using macOS, and overall cements it in the top 3. In addition, this is the first revision of macOS to have two different default wallpapers - and though I'll always stick with the landscape based one, it's good to have options available.

It has a certain charm to it that many of the more plain names lack, and shows that Apple doesn't have to take itself extremely seriously all the time. But over time, I've really grown to like macOS Big Sur as a name.
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Initially, I wasn't sure how to feel about it either. Putting Big Sur this high on the list will definitely be a point of contention for many. However, I think the wallpaper itself is probably the most boring out of all of them, and Apple was definitely starting to focus a little bit too much on the Sierra Nevada mountain range (which contains Yosemite and, by extension, El Capitan). Sierra, simply put, sounds cool as an OS name.
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Bringing "Mac" back into macOS for the first time since Mac OS X Lion was in my opinion a very welcome change, and one that not only unified the style of OS names across Apple's lineup but also made them a little less clunky to say.

Sierra was the first version of macOS that was called, well, macOS. However, Sierra snags a higher spot for one simple reason detailed below. macOS Sierra and Catalina come very close on this list both are short, sweet, and even sound fairly similar. Santa Catalina is a beautiful island, and the dynamic wallpaper that comes by default with macOS Catalina is truly excellent. However, in comparison to many of the other names we've gotten, it does lose points for being a little less creative.
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I do really like High Sierra for the incredible autumn colors in its wallpaper (probably my favorite standalone wallpaper so far), the reference to Apple's legendary Crack Marketing Team baked into the name (lol), and the throwback to older names given for more incremental OS releases like Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion. In addition, Yosemite kicked off a four OS-long streak of mountain themed desktop pictures, that while beautiful, did get a little stale near the end.Ĭhoosing the order for the top six macOS names was a little more difficult than the bottom two. Because of this, OS X Yosemite has always felt a little cliche to me as Yosemite National Park is one of the most famous national parks in the whole US, attracting tourists internationally. One cool aspect about the California naming scheme is that it allows us to learn about cool places many of us have never heard about. Also, El Capitan is a rock formation within Yosemite rather than its own unique location, making it more uninspired than many of the other names. I'm also personally a larger fan of the "macOS" branding over "OS X," because I feel like it's easier for people less familiar with macOS to understand and also avoids the whole pronunciation issue (is it "OS ex" or " OS ten")? El Capitan is the last version to follow this style before Sierra was introduced the following year.

Names like macOS Sierra and macOS Mojave are short and sweet, and by comparison OS X El Capitan feels long and clunky. First off, it's the only California name so far with four words in it. Although I'm a personal fan of all the names Apple has come up with so far, El Capitan has never been my favorite for several reasons. This list will be based only around the name itself and the location/wallpaper, not around how much I like using the particular OS.Įl Capitan starts us off at the bottom of this list. Inspired by another post asking about the general consensus on the California location-themed names for macOS, I decided to put together my personal ranking of all eight revisions of OS X/macOS since Mavericks.
