Apple Releases First macOS Sonoma 14.6 Public Beta

At this point, they should just jump the version number up to align with iOS. That way we can just refer to a consistent number.

And let’s be honest, de facto if not technically, macOS has become another fork of iOS.

Actually, I think all operating systems, and hardware, should just be named by the year it was released, like cars. I've got an iPhone 2023, running iOS 2023, but will upgrade to iOS 2024.

NGL sonoma and sequoia back to back is confusing af. I will forever forget which one was which.

At this point, they should just jump the version number up to align with iOS. That way we can just refer to a consistent number.

And let’s be honest, de facto if not technically, macOS has become another fork of iOS.

It has not, they are very different. All one has to do is see all the walls and limitations iOS and its derivatives show up doing anything exactly the same. Take comparing MacOS browsers to browsers on iPadOS which is an extended version of iOS. Does a 3rd party browser use it own engine for most regions, nope. You still stuck with Apple's restrictive webkit implementations.
reference
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/google-and-mozilla-are-working-on-ios-browsers-that-break-current-app-store-rules/

The iOS versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and others can currently sync with their desktop counterparts and present whatever user interface they want, but the WebKit requirement means their capabilities and shortcomings are mostly the same as Safari's. No such restriction exists on macOS, where third-party browsers can use whatever rendering engine they please.

Now for the EU DMA Apple needed to allow different web engines to be available for browsers, but that not true for everyone else.

At this point, they should just jump the version number up to align with iOS. That way we can just refer to a consistent number.

And let’s be honest, de facto if not technically, macOS has become another fork of iOS.

The whole "naming" of macOS could have been ditched starting with macOS 11 IMHO.

It now feels awkward to me to have all these normal numeric  OS and for whatever reason make macOS the exception.
Back in the "cat-naming" times, it was nice and cool, and using nice locations in California from 10.9 onwards also made sense, but with macOS 11 they had the opportunity to simply ditch the names and align with the rest: use a number.
I never use the name TBH.

Who’s twisting your arm to update?

Can't install security updates separately. Walmart has customers do their own checkout, apple is copying this by having customers do their own testing.?

I very much dislike how Sequoia comes before Sonoma in the alphabet. I named my first kid with an L and the second with a W for this exact reason. My brain sorts alphabetical, ascending.