As you’re well aware
by now, this morning, Apple sent out invites to an event taking place in one week at their headquarters in Cupertino, CA. The invite reads, “Back to the Mac.” and asks those invited to “Come see what’s new for the Mac on October 20, including a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X.” But the most interesting thing about the invite has to be the picture. It’s an Apple logo cut out a sheet of metal that has been slightly turned to reveal what’s behind the sheet: a lion.
Apple began using big cat nicknames with initial release of OS X. 10.0 was “Cheetah”, 10.1 was “Puma”, 10.2 was “Jaguar”, 10.3 was “Panther”, 10.4 was “Tiger”, 10.5 was “Leopard”, and the current version, 10.6, is “Snow Leopard”. Initially, these were internal code names at Apple, but they eventually became a part of the marketing for the OS. And it certainly looks like OS X 10.7 is going to be dubbed “Lion”.
On the surface, that nickname could easily be discounted as just a random big cat Apple hasn’t used yet. But this is Apple, they don’t do “random”. There are a few big cats left that Apple could have chosen from — Lynx, Cougar (har har), and even Clouded Leopard come to mind — but they’re going with Lion, the kind of the jungle. To me, this means they intend this version of OS X to be big.
via techcrunch.com