The annual speculation: What could macOS 27 be called? | News

Mac OS X 10.0 had the internal name Cheetah, while in Mac OS However, only users who were a little more interested in the background knew about it. But Apple quickly realized how attractive it was not just to mention version numbers, but to use descriptive names like this. Mac OS Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion (10.8) were to follow until Apple slowly ran out of animals and switched to prominent places.

New names since 10.9: Locations
The surfing town of Mavericks marked the beginning of the new naming scheme, OS X 10.10 was named after the famous Yosemite National Park and OS The Sierra Mountain Range (10.12) was followed by the High Sierra (10.13), the Mojave Desert (10.14) and Catalina Island (10.15). There was no 10.16, because Big Sur (coastal strip) had version number 11, replaced by the lakeside resort of Monterey (12), the surfing paradise of Ventura west of Los Angeles (13) and the world-famous wine-growing region of Sonoma (14) – and then switched to a national park or a tree species with Sequoia (15) and to a lake with the current macOS Tahoe. The latter was accompanied by the simultaneous switch to using macOS 26 instead of 16.

Numerous unused trademark entries
A few days before the first official presentation of the system updates, the question arises as usual as to what name Apple could pull out of the hat this time. In recent years, Apple has been consistently working through a list of registered trademarks that were registered more than a decade ago. The following entries from this are still unused: California, Diablo (mountain & canyon), Miramar (city), Rincon (surf resort), Shasta (mountain), Farallon (islands), Tiburon (city or peninsula), Skyline, Mammoth (lake or tree species), Redwood (national park and tree species) and the Napa wine region.

Will it be Big Bear or Emerald this time?
What is interesting is a place that is not in the brand list, but is in an image name. For the invitation logo, Apple used a graphic with “Project_Big_Bear_2026” in the URL – another lake. Of course, this could be a project name that Apple only uses internally, but geographical names are definitely suspicious. Another contender is “Emerald” (Bay), a section of Lake Tahoe. In the past, Apple liked to title updates that were primarily about stability and bug fixing with combinations of the previous name. Examples include Leopard and Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion, and Sierra and High Sierra. Based on this logic, Emerald would be conceivable, although there is not as clear evidence for this as in the case of “Big Bear”.