Aqua was a UI that dominated much of macOS’s existence from 2000 – 2013, losing bits and chunks of it’s style along the way while morphing into multiple different versions that longtime Mac users have grown to love. The very last version of Aqua to contain any elements of the original Aqua was OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and the original version of Aqua remained largely unchanged from 10.10 Cheetah through 10.2.8 Jaguar.
But what if Apple never-ever changed Aqua from its original style palette/design, only to accommodate iterations in spacing/functionality versus any skin changes at all? What would macOS Sequoia look like in 2025 if they just kept the Jaguar style and only tweaked it here and there? To answer this question today, I turned to Adobe Photoshop CS4 for a fun little project.
Using the combination of screenshots from an actual 15″ 1.25 PowerBook G4 running Jaguar and real macOS Sequoia screenshots, we can begin to imagine what a “Jaguar” Aqua-reskinned macOS Sequoia would look like.. erm.. if the theme never changed at all.
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- I did what I thought was best in mimicking what would theoretically be the “correct” look to the best of my understanding of what it “should” look like. I was 50/50 on whether or not to keep the dock more modern looking, and decided to keep the Sequoia dock. It could be one of those iterative changes, chopping off the corners versus a whole thematic change.
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- With the existence of Mac OS X Tiger, Dashboard made easy work of making a mockup “widget/Notification Center”. These are just Command + Shift + 4 + Spacebar + Clicks, and it took individual screenshots of the dashboard widgets themselves!
In Conclusion
These are just a few mockups done for fun, though wouldn’t it be nice if macOS Sequoia really looked like this? It’s been a pinch over 25 years since Apple unveiled the first version of Mac OS X, which happened to look alot like this UI that’s been presented in this article (although the public beta had some differences), and alot has changed since then.
Between the advent of smartphones, the changes between processor architectures, new products and even a new CEO, macOS has faced alot of iterations and adaptations to get it to where it is today. It’s fun to be nostalgic and think of a world where this classic OS X interface remains into the modern day, and what it would look like.
It harkens back to a time of translucent computer tower handles, brushed metal, and the glimmer of hope people felt who were rooting for Apple – now on the up and up after Jobs’s return in ’97.
