Apple had a pretty good 2001. Its iMacs were selling well and the flat-panel iMac was in the lab. It unveiled a wee music thing it called the iPod. It invited ridicule by planning to open its own shops. And it shipped the first desktop version of Mac OS X. Cheetah, as it was codenamed, was a revelation. Where operating systems were packed with unpleasantness, almost painful to look and and apparently designed specifically to go wrong at the worst possible moment, OS X was lickably pretty, a delight to use and utterly reliable. I'm not being funny about the lickable thing, by the way: that was one of Apple's design goals. Steve Jobs wanted an interface that, when you saw it, "you wanted to lick it." It's a sign of just how good the design was that, despite a few wrong turns into places such as The Land of Brushed Metal, OS X still looks fresh today. The Aqua interface was gorgeous, but OS X was still a pretty big gamble.
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