2026 retrospective
The joke: Apple had just announced Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) at WWDC 2008, over a year before its actual release in August 2009. On a Mac, the “About This Mac” version string is stored in a plain text plist file (
The joke: Apple had just announced Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) at WWDC 2008, over a year before its actual release in August 2009. On a Mac, the “About This Mac” version string is stored in a plain text plist file (
/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist). Edit it, reopen “About This Mac,” and congratulations — you’re running an OS that doesn’t exist yet. Apple has since made this file read-only on modern macOS via System Integrity Protection.
And this is the proof:
(Of course, if you know about SystemVersion.plist, skip this entry ;)