Never Argue Again About The Pronunciation Of “OS X” (Proof Included)

Higgidy higgidy who gives a fuck.

So the Apple products Xserve and Xsan are pronounced “ten-serve” and “ten-san” respectively then.

so i guess i was wrong all those years playing megaman eks, not megaman ten….

This argument is ridiculous. No matter how you may want to pronounce it, the fact is Apple has an operating system called OS X, which THEY chose to pronounce OS Ten. THAT is the correct way to pronounce it. It’s really not up for discussion since THEY made it up and THEY decide how it should be pronounced. The fact that they chose to use an X is purely a marketing issue and has nothing to do with anything based in linguistics. The fact is, seeing “OS 10″ or “OS Ten” is simply not as cool as seeing “OS X”. Yes, the X has all the references to the roman numeral, NeXT, and UNIX, but that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that it is pronounced “OS Ten”.

The same goes for Linux. Just because you grew up with a Peanuts character named Linus, doesn’t mean that Linux is pronounced with a long “i”.

There are still people out there that don’t pronounce the “-ee” at the end of Nike because they are trying to follow English grammatical rules. Referring to OS X as OS eks, is just as wrong.

Have you ever seen signs at a railroad crossing? It’s usually Railroad X-ing or Xing. You wouldn’t pronounce that eks-ing or zing, would you? The X represents “cross”, just as the X in “OS X” represents the number 10, not the letter X.

I guess if you pronounce Xmas the way it is written instead of Christmas, you’ll never understand.

“Mac OS X” is pronounced “Mac o’ sex”. That is how the early developers referred to it. The first time I heard “OS ten” was in a presentation from Jobs. the “ex” sound was banned for marketing reasons, to avoid indecent connotations.

Bugsy Malone

It can be pronounced both ways you blogging douche. It is both the 10th generation of the mac OS, and as well as an OS that behaves like X-windows (that is, a gui that runs on top of a unix kernel.. in this case BSD running the bourne again shell).

modex, I agree with your premise (It can be pronounced both ways), but not your argument (and insults).

First, I would consider it inaccurate to say that that OS X is the 10th generation of the Mac OS. It was not descended from the other nine OSs produced by Apple. You could perhaps say that OS X is the tenth operating system released by Apple, though.

Second, OS X is not BSD either, though they share a common heritage. OS X's kernel is called Darwin and is derived from NeXTSTEP, which (although it used some BSD code) was a successor of the Mach kernel.

Third, the only time you are running the Bourne-Again Shell is when you explicitly run it, e.g. in a terminal. It's not performing your regular GUI tasks.

I'm not really sure what you mean when you say that it behaves like X-windows: the interface, while not a part of the Darwin kernel, is still a huge part of OS X. Darwin itself isn't a very compelling operating system, it's the combination of Cocoa, Quartz, et al. that make it a good OS.