Amaya Toman Do you know someone who can list all of Apple's desktop operating systems by heart? And will Copland be among them? If this name doesn't mean anything to you, don't be surprised. The first beta version of Mac OS Copland only reached about fifty developers, and nowhere else.
Copland wasn't so much a regular Mac OS update as a completely new operating system with everything in it. Apple equipped Copland with new-generation features, thanks to which the operating system was supposed to defeat the prevailing Windows 95 at the time. Unfortunately, Copland never made it to the public. Instead, he became a real nightmare for the apple company. It even earned its own chapter in Owen Linzmayer's book Apple Confidential, titled "The Copland Crisis." The website also covers it in more detail LowEndMac.
A few screenshots from the Mac OS Copland beta:
Gallery
The revolutionary system of the time
For many years, both users and Apple employees have claimed that their Macs offer a much better user experience than that enjoyed by owners of regular PCs. When the talk of the then brand new Windows 95 began, Apple quickly realized that it was necessary to rethink its existing operating system and be one step ahead of Microsoft again. And in any case, it wasn't just a small step - given that Macs were significantly more expensive than PCs, Cupertino needed to really "pull out".
Apple introduced Mac OS Copland in March 1994. The operating system was named after the American composer Aaron Copland and was supposed to represent a completely new concept of Mac OS - at a time when OS X with its Unix base was still in the stars.
Copland offered a number of features that may sound familiar to us today: Spotlight-style search functionality, improved multitasking, the ability to hide icons in a variation of the Dock, and many others. The system also allowed multiple users to log in with individual settings – these functions are a matter of course for today's users, but they were revolutionary at the time. Copland was also highly customizable: users could choose from several themes, including a futuristic Dark Mode look.
What actually happened?
However, Mac OS Copland never reached ordinary users. Its beta version was released in 1995, the full version was supposed to be released in 1996. But the release was delayed by one year and with each delay the budget grew. The more Apple delayed the release of Copland, the more it felt obliged to enrich it with even more features in order to keep up with the times (and overtake Microsoft).
In 1996, Copland had five hundred engineers working on a staggering budget of $250 million a year. When Apple announced it was $740 million in losses, then-CEO Gil Amelio broke the news that Copland would be released as a series of updates instead of a single release. A few months later, however, Apple put the entire project on hold. Like many other Apple projects of the time, Copland showed great promise. But circumstances did not favor his success.
