Welcome to another great show
right here on ITProTV. You're watching the CompTIA IT
Fundamentals for Exam FCO-U61. I'm your host Ronnie Wong, and today
we're diving into Mac OS or Apple macOS, and little mac is not a typo as you
actually saw right there on the screen. And here to help us to understand why that
is as well as the operating system itself is Mr. Don Pezet. Don, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back, Ronnie. And we are continuing on our
series on operating systems. We've talked about what operating
systems are in general. We took a look at Microsoft Windows which
is the most popular operating system. In this episode, though, we're gonna
be taking a look at Apple's macOS, which has been a fairly small market
share operating system over the years, but in recent times it has been
growing twofold year over year. It's just gaining more and more market
share and becoming more and more common. So we're going to take a look at what
macOS is, how it works, how it came about, and see how it differs in some areas but
is very, very similar to Microsoft windows,
which makes it incredibly easy to use. We have software that we can load,
we can make sure that we function, and we are able to operate inside
of an Apple environment, or the Apple ecosystem, all using macOS. That's what we're gonna take a look
at right here in this episode. All right, so Don, help us to get started. Give us a little bit of a historical
background on it, cuz most people, again, are still interested in that a little bit,
and where we are actually gonna be taking a look at today. All right, let's start off with the name. Cuz you mentioned it
is a little confusing, and you'll hear people refer to macOS as,
well, Mac OS. You hear people call it Mac OS 10 or
OS 10, you'll hear that name
kind of thrown about. And it all is tied back to the history,
right? So macOS is developed
a company called Apple. And Apple has been around since the '70s. If you have not heard of Apple,
I don't think that's possible. I think their marketing team has been so
effective that everybody's heard of Apple. But it might be because you have
an iPhone or iPad or Apple watch. It may not be related to your
physical computer at all. But Apple has been a computer
company since the 1970s. And they created a series of computers
that were designed to give programmers and hobbyists access to their system
to be able to do a lot more. Apple was one of the first companies
to embrace a graphical user interface. And they released a line of computers
called the Apple Macintosh. The Macintosh computers had a GUI,
they were easy to use. They had a mouse. You could actually interact with a mouse,
not just a keyboard, like a lot of other vendors
were doing at the time. And the Macintosh computer is what has
evolved over the years to be what we now call a Mac, right? So when I say it's an Apple Mac, that's
actually just short for Apple Macintosh. But that's not me abbreviating it, Apple themselves no longer use
the Macintosh term anywhere. When you look at all of their marketing,
and branding and so on, you don't see Macintosh, but
that is where that originally came from. So the Macs, they've evolved quite a bit over the years as well as the operating
system that runs on them. When we talk about a mac,
we're talking about the hardware. And the operating system that
runs on top of it, well, when the original Macintosh came out,
that was called macOS. And it was called macOS for
many, many years. And then Apple decided to
make a change at one point. Macs used to use proprietary processors. They used a processor that
was called a power PC. It was a different type of CPU than
anybody else was using at the time. Well, I mean, there were a few people, but on a mainstream basis
nobody else was using it. It was a very powerful processor,
but it made Macs very different. That's why they had to have
their own operating system. You couldn't run
Microsoft Windows on a Mac. The processor is just different. Well, they decided to make a change
to move to standard processors, to Intel-based processors. And when they made that change, that made it where the hardware is very
similar to what Microsoft Windows runs on. And Mac OS changed at that time as well,
and they rebranded it. Instead of calling it Mac OS,
they called it OS 10. And it was called OS X. It was actually written O-S and
the letter X. It's the roman numeral for ten. And I know it's called OS X for
well over ten years. And only recently, actually about two
years ago, or maybe just one year ago, really not too long ago, Apple decided to
go back to the old name, back to MacOS. So when you hear people say OS 10, they're
not wrong, this is a recent change. So some people call it Mac OS
some people call if OS X. The original name was Mac OS,
it moved away, now it's back again, and so now it's called Mac OS. And they're doing that to line up
with their mobile operating systems. The iPhone and iPad,
they run what's called iOS, right? Lowercase I, capital O, capital S. The I for iPhone and iPad. You've got watch OS for the Apple watch,
you've got TV OS for the Apple TV. On the Mac, you have Mac OS,
for your mac, right? So it's trying to get
the names all synchronized, that's what Apple is working to do. So when you buy a Mac today,
it comes with Mac OS, which is just the latest version of OS X,
same basic idea. When you look at it, you have
a graphical user interface, and the user interface isn't much different than it was
when the system was called OS X, right? But it is different from
the original Mac OS. The original Mac OS was
a good bit different. But when I look at it, I've got it pulled up here on my system,
this is a standard Mac OS desktop. And if I'm running different versions, the
screens might look a little bit different. The wallpaper's always different. Apple uses a different
wallpaper in each version. But the icons down here in the Dock
bar are pretty much the same. Those don't change that much as Apple adds
in software and tweaks it a little bit. But if I go up to my Apple menu up top
here, I can choose About this Mac, and I can see that I'm running
macOS High Sierra, right? Now, High Sierra is a code name for
this particular version. I'm running version 10.13.4. 10.13 is High Sierra. 10.12 was called Sierra by itself. 10.11 was called El Capitan. They have names that go along with
it because people have an easier time remembering a name than a number,
right? I'm not going to remember 10.13, but
I can remember Mac OS High Sierra, right? It's a little bit easier. So that makes things a little
bit confusing on the names. But it's all designed to be,
well, in theory, simple. Just MacOS. That's it. I'm not having to worry
about all the other details. Apple's design methodology is that they
want the system to be easy, right? They have this marketing slogan
when they say it just works, right? You press the power button,
you get into the operating system, and you can get to work right away. It's designed to be intuitive and
easy to learn. But if somebody's never used a computer
before, they can come in, look at it, and they say, wait a minute, here's this
button down here, and if I click on that, it's gonna launch the program. And they don't have to learn, they don't have to take a course
to learn how to use Mac OS. They can just stumble through and
figure it out. That's the goal. And that's how they launched
the Macintosh line way back in the 1980s. All the way to today where the Mac
is their standard computer line. This is the main computer product. They actually do sell
more iPhones than Macs, which is kind of a weird business model. But the Macs themselves are very reliable, very stable computers,
that are very intuitive and easy to use. That's really all a part of what macOS stands for. Now, Don, in the idea of the user interface, and I
know that in the previous episode where we talked about Windows a little bit,
you talked about the idea of an Explorer. Is there something very
similar to that inside of the macOS? Sure. When I look at macOS, the user interface
that I'm seeing is actually called Aqua. The Aqua interface. When Apple switched the original
macOS over to OS X, this UI was developed called Aqua that was
designed to be smooth and liquidy, right? Everything was supposed to, everything
used to look like little rain drops. Everything had curved edges and
little lighted bezels and fancy artifacts. It's changed a lot over the last decade. And now, things are a lot more flat,
like the dock bar down here. See how it's just kind of like
this flat grey background. And that's it. It used to be that it looked like glass
and kinda reflected a little bit. They do little screen
element changes like that. But the interface is still
the Aqua interface, but you really don't hear people mention that. What most people mention when they talk about the interface is
they'll call it the Finder, right? But the interface is not the Finder. the Finder is just something
that runs inside it. The Finder helps you locate
applications and files on your system. So it is what we interact with a lot. There's two main ways to
interact with the Finder. The first way is with the icon right here. This icon,
this smiley face with two halves, that's actually the Macintosh icon,
but they use it for the Finder application cuz it's kind
of the primary application that we run. If I click on that,
it's gonna launch the finder, and now I can browse through my storage
to find any documents, downloads, applications, and other things
that I might have on my system. It makes it where I can easily
locate information and work with it. So this becomes like one of our primary
ways of interacting with the computer. It also has the ability to do a search. See the little search that's
right here in the top? Or I didn't even have to do that. If I was way back here on my desktop,
and I wanted to find that HP Easy Start that we saw in My Documents, you've got
a little magnifying glass up here in your top bar that you can click and
it takes you to the Spotlight search. Spotlight is a system hooked into the
finder that is indexing all of our files, all of our applications, all of our
folders, to make it easy to find. But not just that. It also indexing things on the web, so that we can do searches
across the Internet. If I want to search that HP Easy Start,
and I type in hp easy, it found HP Easy Start right there in
my system and I can run it, right? But maybe that's not what I wanted. Now I can look down a little bit
further and we can find other websites. Maybe I'm trying to find support.hp.com,
right? So it's searching both. And as you use the computer, the spotlight
learns a little bit more about stuff you frequently access,
stuff you infrequently access. And these search results get more and
more and more accurate over time so
that it becomes very, very robust. So when we interact with
macOS using the Finder and using Spotlight, those are two tools
that make things really simple. And that's really how we interacting. But it's all being delivered via the Aqua
User Interface to make it look nice on our screen. That when I launch a window like this,
it's got certain elements to it. Some elements are just pretty, right? Like this drop shadow
here on the background. See that shadow, and as I move this
around, see how the shadow moves as well? That's the aqua interface
redrawing that shadow. And it gives us these three buttons. The red button to close the window,
the yellow button to minimize it and get it out of the way, and
the the green button to go full screen. If I'm browsing the web, for example, and
I know I'm gonna be browsing the web for a while, I'm gonna be looking at
the obvious web page today, so I'm gonna be on this for a little while. I can hit that green button to go
full screen, and when I do that, it's going to think about it for
a second, there we go. It's gonna go full screen and all the
other screen elements disappear, right? My status bar up at the top, the doc
down at the bottom, they’ll disappear. And now,
I’m just looking at the web browser. I’m using the web browser,
so give it the whole screen, let me get the most screen real
estate possible out of it. Now, once that’s done, I’m in here,
I’m able to browse around. And I can actually access more than
one application while I’m in here. You actually have a whole work
space system in place that lets me kind of launch these applications and
switch in between them, right? Switching between windows is
an important part of any user interface. It facilitates making it
where we can access these. Now, when you go full screen,
it's kind of like, how do I multi-task? How do I launch another program
if I'm stuck here in full screen? Well, you have a system which,
actually you know what, I might not be able to show there. Let me jump over here. This is my actual laptop. And I'm gonna launch Safari, and if I take it full screen, once it's
full screen, it's filling up everything. You can do this little three finger
swipe gesture on your touch pad. And it lets you move in between
the different environments. So I can go to the Safari
window I just launched, or I can go over to VMware Fusion where I'm
seeing that Yahoo window that I had. I can move in between these, and the user
interface is providing me the ability to do that through simple gesture control,
a couple of finger swipes on a touchpad, or clicking a button up in my top bar or
whatever. That's all powered by the user interface. And giving you things like
gestures on the keyboard, that's designed to be easily
accessible for people. I'm not having to remember,
I need to hit Control + Command + X. I just swipe three fingers. That's something simple
people can interact with. That's really part of that
design methodology macOS, and you see it carried through everywhere,
trying to make things as easy as possible. Now, Don, as we take a look as well, since you mentioned the idea of Finder, I did notice that it showed
a hard drive with a computer. Are we still gonna see things
like drive letters here or anything like that? Sure. So in Microsoft Windows, when we had
drives they showed up with a drive letter. I had a C: drive and a D: drive. Apple doesn't do that. Apple just gives them a name. Makes a little more sense, right? So your Mac will likely
have a hard drive in it, otherwise it won't turn on. [LAUGH] And so it's got a hard drive, and that hard drive is usually
just called Macintosh HD. There's that Macintosh name,
kinda sneaks in on us. When I come into my Finder,
that's not what I see, right? When I go into my Finder, I see my Recent
files, my Applications, my Desktop. This is stuff that I go to every day,
right? But it actually does see my drive,
it's just hidden from me. Cuz your average user doesn't need to
browse to their regular drive, right? Up in my top menu up here,
you'll see the Go menu. And under Go, you'll see those same
places that you can navigate, but there's one extra one in the list. Computer. And if I click on that to go to My Computer, now I see
the Macintosh HD sitting right there. And I can browse into it, and I can
start navigating that file system and seeing my storage and so on. But that being said, we don't really
mess with most of these folders. The folder that we mess
with is our home folder. If I go into Users and I go into dpezet,
that's my user account, I go in there, and now I see Documents, Downloads,
Desktop, wich I also see over here. So I didn't really need to navigate
to the drive to do it, right? Apple says, hey,
we're going to make this easy for you and give you a quick way to get to it and
not have to worry about the drive. But if I start plugging in
additional hard drives, they'll all show up under that computer
window where I was just at a moment ago. So I choose Go and Computer,
they'll all show up in here, and they'll just have a name,
whatever they're named. I'll named mine easy things
like Time Machine or Storage or whatever, depending on
what I'm gonna use it for. My storage one, that's where I keep files. My time machine one, that's where
I put my time machine backups. And those names are easy to address. I don't have to look at it and
say, look, there's an S drive. What is S? S may stand for storage, it might stand
for something else, I don't know. So here, we just have a name and
that makes life a lot easier. Apple uses what are called mount points. These are actually getting
mounted to a file system. And to give you guys an idea what this
looks like if we did it the hard way, let me drop to the terminal. When we use macOS,
what we see is the Aqua user interface. And it is smooth, and easy, and intuitive,
and anybody can figure it out, right? But in the background,
macOS is actually running BSD Unix, it's running a very powerful
server operating system. But it just has a super-easy
UI stuck on top of it. And if I drop down to that basic operating
system that's behind the scenes, I can start to kinda unravel
the mystery of what all is going on. And when I look in the file system,
in here I can find where there's that Macintosh hard drive,
where it's mounted to the file system and any time I plug in another drive,
it's doing this. It's mounting them here, fortunately,
you don't have to do what I just did. You don't have to drop to the terminal and navigate into this to find
it because the UI shows it. We see it in the graphical user interface,
through the finder, and we don't have to navigate through this,
right? But this is the actual operating
system behind the scene. When we talk about Mac OS. But the kernel for Mac OS, the actual
operating system is built on BSD Unix. And its called Darwin, that if I do a,
this is a Unix command, to ask for the Unix name, it tells
me that this is the Darwin kernel. So that is a very powerful, very stable,
very robust operating system that is very unuser friendly like most users could
not even run a program inside of Darwin, better yet
actually operate in a normal basis. Apple uses that though because
it's stable and powerful and it's a network operating system through
and through and it is very robust. And then where their
real claim to fame is, is they take that nightmare of a difficult
OS, and then they turn it into the easiest operating system
to use on the planet, Mac OS. It's simple, you can stick it in
front of your grandparents, and they can dive in and
start to get things done with just a moderate level of clicking around and
exploring. They can figure it out,
we don't have to have documentation and things that's a big deal. >> Now Don, the idea here also if I create a file,
can I take a file from this Mac OS and move it to a Window system? You can as far as like copying a file via the network. But as far as a hard drive,
you can't necessarily move a hard drive from a MAC to a Windows
machine and back and forth. When we talk about Windows we talk about
their file system they have, the NTFS or New Technology File System. Well, Apple has their own file systems. They have the High Performance File System
or HFS, they also have, well HFS is usually called MAC OS Extended
is what a lot of people call it. They also have a new one which is
called APFS, or the Apple File System. Those file systems are different than
what you have in Microsoft Windows, but they provide very
similar functionality. When I launch my finder and I start browsing through the hard drive,
I'm browsing through my file system. It's telling it what folders are here and
what files are inside of that. It's all learning that
from the file system. And when I have files, like my HP Easy
Start here that in the file system, it's keeping track of various setting and
options, like I can give them color tags. The file system is allowing it to keep
track of what those file tags are. It's called metadata,
it's tracking that metadata and you'll see other options,
like the ability to lock a file, or so on. You can set permissions on a file,
and control who can access it. So very similar to NTFS, where it gives
us the same kind of functionality, Apple's File System is doing that as well. It's just doing it in a way that's not
really observant, we don't see it, right? But if I were to do something
like go into the Disk Utility, I launch the disk utility. And I take a look at my disk,
I can see it right here, that this one's actually formatted
with the Apple File System, APFS. And APFS is not supported by Windows, just like NTFS from Windows is
not supported by Apple, right? They're proprietary, they're tied
to their own operating systems. So we always have to be aware that
this is a function of Mac OS. The APFS, the Apple File System
is only supported by Mac OS, so if you want APFS you've got to run Mac OS. Now Don, what about the idea of applications, too. So is this actually something that's gonna
be a little more difficult since you said the operating system is
such a nightmare to work with? Apple has done a great job in making it super easy to install applications. On the Windows side, we had to
download installer and run it and you'll click through a wizard and so on. On the Apple side, they do have what
are called application bundles. Let me show you how this works. If you watched the Windows episode, I downloaded a program called
Sublime Text and I installed it. Well, let's do that same
thing here on the Mac side. So I'm gonna go and download Sublime Text,
[COUGH] so it's gonna download. So there it goes, it's gonna go into my Downloads folder and
let me just pull that up. So it is downloading right now and
that installer, when I run that installer, it's gonna open
it up as if it was another hard drive. And so it's gonna open right up and
I'm gonna see this virtual disk, it's like a fake hard drive. Here is the application Sublime Text, and here's a shortcut to my
application's folder. So to install Sublime Text I just drag it
and drop it on the applications folder, right? And that just installed Sublime Text. I've actually got it installed,
and it's running. Well, actually it's not running yet. If I go into my Applications folder,
though, I can find Sublime Text in here. I can double-click on it,
and it's gonna launch. And it's giving me a warning saying this
was downloaded from the internet am I sure I wanna run it, right? Do I trust it? I can hit Open, and then it's gonna pop
up and, oops, how about right there. And now, I'm in Sublime Text, right? So, now I can work,
I can start typing text and so on. It's installed and it was easy, right? And then, if I decide that I don't want
it anymore, I'm done with Sublime Text, I wanna uninstall it. I just take that icon and I drag it and
my head's actually gonna cover this up, so down in the bottom right
corner of my screen. I can take that and I can drag it down to
my trash bin and I can just drop if off there and it deletes it and
now I've uninstalled Sublime Text. It's designed to be easy, right? And that was, you're just dragging and
dropping the file. That installs the program and
uninstalls the program. It's even easier if I use the App store,
right? If I fire up Apple's App store, I can come
in here and I can find applications and install them, but problem here I don't
think Sublime Text is actually in. Yea it’s not in here. So the software I want is not
here in the app store, but if the software I want is in the app
store like maybe I want Textastic. I can come in and I can download
it here its $7.99, I can buy it. But you can install it and now it’s
just done right here through point and click and you’re done. You don’t even have to drag and
drop the file, right? But really easy to get
software put in Mac OS. All right Don, the idea here once we actually
get that software installed and everything is good, and
the uninstall actually finishes happening. Do will still have the same issues,
like what I had mentioned maybe previously here, where applications can close and
still be running in the background. And I can I see something
like that happens. They can, right? So it's a multitasking operating system. You guys see me moving
between windows here, as I still have my disk utility running
in the background, forgot about it. Or with Sublime Text,
if I'll install it again. Once it's installed, I can run it and
maybe it's floating in the background. In Mac OS, it's actually really easy to
forget that you left a program running. Because, for example, if I close this
window, it's gonna ask if I wanna save it, I'm not going to, and I close it. Notice up here in my taskbar,
it still says Sublime Text is running. I closed the window I was working in,
but the program is indeed still running. And that's because I might wanna come
in here and create a new file, and now I'm right back into it, right? Well, if you wanna see
what's running on your mac, you easily see it down here in your doc. The doc has actually gotten bigger. It gets bigger on the right under my head,
but when I ran sublime text down here
you'll see it added it to the list. And there's the Disk Utility and they got a little dot beneath them letting
me know that they're actually running. If I launch the App Store now
it's got a dot beneath it. So that's one way to keep track of
whats running on your system and to know if an application is
still out there doing something. We also have the activity monitor. If I fire up the activity monitor, it's very similar to
the task manager in Windows. I can see all the programs that
are running on my computer and I can come in here and look. I'll just sort it alphabetically here, I
can look and see, is Sublime Text running? If I poke around,
I should be able to find it, there's Sublime Text still running
in the background on mine. And I see a lot of other things too. I see applications that I run,
but I also see services and other processes that are running
in the background that are just trying to make life easier for me, right? Somethings like Spotlight. Spotlight is indexing the storage of my
system, so I can search and find things. So Spotlight needs to run in the
background so it can find stuff, right? Software update is running software
updates to make sure that my that my system stays updated, if there's
a vulnerability, a virus, or whatever. Apple will push an update out to
make sure that I don't get infected. Software updates will run in
the background and do that. That's all being powered by macOS,
it's taking care of managing all that for me so I don't have to worry about it. Don, the idea of user accounts, is that also something we can do with Apple? Sure, yeah, because this is built on top of Unix,
which is a multi-user operating system, macOS is a multi-user
operating system as well. It carries over that feature. Right now, i'm just logged in as me. And when you get a brand new Mac and
you set it up the first time, it walks you through a basic series of
setting up your first user account. So you have one user account. But if you want more, you can just
go into your system preferences. If I hit my Apple up top, and
I go to System Preferences, I'll see a lot of settings that I can
configure and change here in my system. Very similar to
the Control Panel on Windows. Here I have the system preferences for
a Mac. And way down here at the bottom,
I've got Users and Groups. I can dive into that, and
here I see my user account, Don Pezet. There's also a guest account that's
disabled by default, it's off. So there's just one user account. And I can come in and I can add more. Now, I need to be an administrator
to do it, so the tool is locked. I'm gonna unlock that and
provide my password so it knows that I'm an administrator. And once I authenticate,
now I can add in more users. So I can just hit that little plus here,
and I'll create an account for Ronnie. So I'm gonna create that account,
and just provide a password for him to use, and
then I'll create that user. And there we go, he appears right there,
as a standard user. I picked a golf ball for you, Ronnie. You can change your icon if you want,
from something like a golf ball, to, I don't know, here we'll go sunflower. When I see Ronnie, I think sunflowers. LAUGH So here we go, so [LAUGH] we're gonna set the icon up. And the important part
here is not the sunflower. The important part is that my user
account might have my documents, my private information,
things I don't wanna share with Ronnie. And when Ronnie logs in,
I want him to have his own experience, his own documents. Maybe he hates this wallpaper,
he hates nature and doesn't wanna look at mountains and
craziness, you want something more simple. Well, maybe I like the mountains,
I wanna keep it. He can log in as himself and he will
see his own background environment. So I'm gonna switch over to
Ronnie's account this time. And that's gonna take me to the log
in screen, so you can log in. And when he logs in, he'll see his
environment, which is separate from mine. So now I have data privacy, we have customized experience
that's tailored to each of us. And now we can use the computer our own
way and know that our data is secure. Now, he's logging in technically for
the first time, so it has to set up a few basic things,
it's building his profile. I'm gonna just try and
skip through this as quickly as I can so we don't go through it. They want you to set up an Apple ID,
and configure iTunes, and all this other crazy stuff. So we'll skip past that. Microsoft does the same thing, they want
you to set up a Live ID and all that. And here I am. So now I'm at Ronnie's desktop, and
I mentioned he hated the wallpaper, right? So let's go and change that wallpaper. Maybe you're gonna go to space. So there we go, Ronnie's got a space
background, that's what he wants, right? But now when I come to the computer,
I can switch over to my user account. And when I log in as me,
I got my mountains back, right? We each have our own experience. That's a key thing, especially in
a business environment, where users need to have their own space for storing
data, keeping it secure and private. For a home user, maybe you don't care,
you just use a single account. But for businesses, you almost always need
to have multiple user accounts like this. All right, Don, well, thank you again for walking us through the very beginning here
of setting up the idea of the Apple macOS. There's a lot of information, something
that we should get familiar with as well. So Don, leaving you with the very last
words on the subject itself once again, what do we have here? macOS is actually really powerful operating system, it can do a heck of a lot more than what
we saw right here in this one episode. This was really just
designed to be a primer, a quick preview of the operating system. If you want to learn more about macOS,
it's covered in the CompTIA A+ exam, a little bit more as far like
troubleshooting and how the OS works. So you'll get to see it some more there. And Apple has their own certifications. There's the Apple Certified
Support Associate and Apple Certified Support Professional. So definitely check those out, and you can
learn a ton about all the capabilities that macOS has, how it functions and
how it does what it does. But as far as operating systems go, know
that macOS is designed to be the easiest to use, but it's also designed
to run just on Apple's hardware. So you have a much more
limited use case scenario for where you can use macOS versus some of
the other operating systems that are out there. All right, thank you, Don, for helping us out here, and
thank you also for watching. Signing off for ITProTV,
I'm your host, Ronnie Wong And I'm Don Pezet. Stay tuned right here for more of the CompTIA IT Fundamentals show! [MUSIC]
