special statement
The data collection, fact checking and writing of this article were completed by myself. After the completion of the draft, I used the GPT 6.1 Sol model to polish some paragraphs.
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origin
When I started planning my self-driving trip to the West Coast, I discovered that the so-called “West Coast Loop” does not have a fixed route. Some people start from Las Vegas and travel all the way along the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley and Utah’s national parks; others start from San Francisco and go south along the Pacific Coast, leaving more time for the seaside towns and coastal scenery along the way.
Each route has its own attractions, but for me, the scenery I want to see most on this trip is very clear: the majestic granite cliffs of Yosemite, the rolling mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and California’s long Pacific coastline.
My yearning for these places started a long time ago. I have been using Mac for the past ten years, and these California place names have long been left in my memory through generations of macOS. Starting with Mavericks in 2013, Apple has successively named operating systems after Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur and other places, bringing the scenery of these places to the desktops of countless Mac users.
Among these California landscapes, Yosemite is what I yearn for the most. After OS X Yosemite was released in 2014, the default wallpaper featuring Half Dome made me remember this place. I saw this granite peak bathed in the sunset on the screen countless times.
With these expectations, I finalized a loop itinerary in California: starting from Los Angeles, going north through Sequoia (Giant Sequoia National Park) and Yosemite, then crossing the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe (Lake Tahoe), then going to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate (Golden Gate Strait), then going to Silicon Valley, and finally heading south along Highway 1, returning to Los Angeles via Monterey (Monterey), Big Sur (Big Sur) and Ventura (Ventura). This route also connects the locations corresponding to the names of multiple Mac operating systems over the past decade or so.
Basic Apple Guy researched the location of the wallpaper shooting in “macOS California Camino”, and Andrew Levitt specially took a helicopter to find the shooting angle closest to the Big Sur wallpaper. But I don’t intend to turn this trip into a simple wallpaper camera mission. The Mojave Desert, Catalina Island, and the actual shooting locations of many versions of the wallpaper were not included in this itinerary.
My journey started in Los Angeles. After leaving the city, both sides of the road gradually turned into large golden hills. There is still plenty of sunshine in California in October, and the road surface looks particularly bright under the strong sunlight.
As the car continued north, the scenery along the way began to slowly change. The open grassy slopes gradually gave way to mountains, the road continued to climb, and the woods became more and more dense. After a few hours, we entered Sequoia, the first national park on this trip.
Sequoia
macOS Sequoia, released in 2024, brings the giant sequoia forest to the Mac desktop. Unlike the past landscape wallpapers that were mainly static photos, Sequoia shows the forest through a dynamic image traveling through the woods. The camera slowly moves forward, the sun shines through the tall tree canopy, and the giant sequoia trees pass by on both sides of the screen, making people more intuitively feel the depth and magnificence of this forest.
The size of the giant sequoia is far more exaggerated than what you see in the photos. Before coming here, I knew that the Giant Sequoia was one of the largest trees in the world, and I had seen many photos of tourists standing under the tree.
When those thick reddish-brown tree trunks actually appear in front of you, it is still difficult to immediately establish an understanding of their size.
Looking back at the photos, the layers between the tree trunks and the surrounding vegetation are still there, but the huge scale felt when standing under the tree and looking up is difficult to convey through photos. Apple used a moving lens to show the depth of the giant sequoia forest, but my photos could only record one angle.
I didn’t find enough information to confirm the specific shooting location of the original image, and I couldn’t tell whether it belonged to the same forest area as the Giant Forest I visited, but for me, this forest left a deep impression.
After leaving Giant Forest, I continued north through Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park and then headed toward Yosemite.
The scenery along the way also gradually changes. More exposed light gray rock walls begin to appear outside the dense forest. The road undulates along the hillside, and occasionally you can see stacked ridges in the distance from high places. Unlike the giant sequoia trees that had to be stood under the trees and looked up at, the scenery here began to become more open and the line of sight could extend further.
From the moment I entered Sequoia, I was already in the Sierra Nevada. This mountain range stretching for hundreds of kilometers not only gave birth to giant sequoia forests, but also shaped Yosemite’s highly recognizable granite valleys. The two national parks are not far apart but have completely different landscapes: in Sequoia, the most surprising thing is the size of the trees; while in Yosemite, what really dominates the view will be the towering rock walls.
Yosemite
The first time I heard the name Yosemite was in “The Biography of Steve Jobs”. The book mentioned that Steve Jobs held a wedding in “Yosemite”. Compared with the direct transliteration of “Yosemite”, I am more impressed by the Chinese translation of “Yosemite”. It uses four poetic Chinese characters, which makes people easily think of a place with beautiful mountains and clear waters.
The 2014 OS X Yosemite is also the generation of Mac system that impressed me the most. Apple almost redesigned the entire OS X interface. The previous Mavericks still retained a lot of skeuomorphic designs, but Yosemite’s windows have become simpler, the Dock and application icons have been replaced with a flat style, and the system has also begun to use a lot of translucent effects. The overall style is obviously closer to iOS 7 released a year ago.
Looking at that interface now is no longer new, but I still remember the amazing feeling when I saw it for the first time, as well as the Half Dome wallpaper under the sunset. This wallpaper is said to have been taken by landscape photographer Jim Patterson, who can also see many Yosemite scenery photos on his personal website. The photo Apple chose does not show the entire Yosemite Valley (Yosemite Valley), but focuses the lens on Half Dome. The huge granite mountain shows a light pink-orange color in the sunset.
This wallpaper has been with me for a long time. Every time I open my MacBook, Half Dome appears on the desktop. This time I came to Yosemite Valley and finally had the opportunity to stay at the foot of the mountain for a night. I chose the Upper Pines campsite, which is located deep in the valley. It is surrounded by tall pine trees. When I look up, I can see the Half Dome in the distance.
In the evening, the setting sun dyed the top of the mountain with warm colors, and the rock walls below had faded into shadow; in the early morning of the next day, the sun illuminated this familiar mountain again.
Although I didn’t deliberately look for a shooting position for the Apple wallpaper, being able to see Half Dome at different times of the day already made me feel that this night of camping was worth it.
Although the light and composition of the Half Dome summit I saw were completely different from the wallpaper, the outline of the arc-shaped summit connecting the steep rock walls was still easily identifiable.
The shape of Half Dome is related to the geological history of Yosemite Valley. It is dominated by granite rocks. Early river erosion and later glaciation jointly shaped the shape of the valley. Half Dome looks as if half of it has been cut off, but its formation also involves rock cracks and peeling, and it cannot simply be understood as a glacier cutting off half of the mountain.
Half Dome is not the only impressive granite wall in Yosemite. There is another equally famous landmark in the same valley.。
The Captain
A year after Yosemite was released, the next version of OS X hasn’t traveled to a new national park or even left Yosemite Valley. Apple just narrowed the system name from the entire Yosemite to one of the iconic granite cliffs:El Capitan。
The framing methods of the two wallpapers are also very different. Yosemite brings Half Dome closer to the center of the frame, while El Capitan shows a wider view of the valley. Looking from Tunnel View, you can see the towering El Capitan on the left, Bridalveil Fall on the right, and Half Dome in the distance. The mountain peaks that had been magnified to almost fill the screen the previous year were now back in the depths of the valley.
I also came to Tunnel View during this trip. Standing on the observation deck, the scenery in front of me is very similar to the familiar wallpaper, except that it lacks snow and warm sunset. The valley is covered with dark green forests, and clouds accumulate above the mountain peaks. El Capitan stands just to the left, a massive rock wall that shines brightly in the sun.
When we drove to the bottom of the valley and looked up at El Capitan from a distance, we found that it was even more spectacular than what we saw from a distance. The entire light-colored granite wall rises from behind the woods, about 900 meters above the valley bottom. The rock wall is covered with elongated cracks and dark water marks.
When you look at it from Tunnel View, it is just a huge rock on the left side of the valley; when you actually stand near the foot of the mountain, you find that the inconspicuous woods in the photo have become the most intuitive reference for judging the height of the rock wall.
El Capitan is also one of the classic climbing locations that rock climbers from all over the world aspire to. On June 3, 2017, rock climber Alex Honnold climbed the nearly 900-meter-high granite cliff along the Freerider route in only 3 hours and 56 minutes without a rope or any protective equipment, becoming the first person to complete this feat. The climb was recorded in the documentary “Free Solo”, which later won the 91st Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
When I stood at the bottom of the valley looking up at El Capitan, I couldn’t help but think of the scene in the movie where Alex clings to the rock wall with only his fingers and toes. I also used the telephoto lens of my phone to take pictures of people climbing on the rock wall. From a distance, the climbers are just an inconspicuous dot on the light-colored rock wall. If you don’t look carefully, it is difficult to even find their existence.
After El Capitan in 2015, Apple set its sights on the wider Sierra Nevada in its next-generation system. In 2016, OS X was officially renamed macOS, and the name of the new system changed from a rock wall in the valley to an entire mountain range stretching for hundreds of kilometers: Sierra.
Sierra
macOS Sierra chooses a representative mountain scenery as the default wallpaper. The setting sun dyed the jagged ridges orange-red, the backlit rock walls showed a cold gray, there was still snow in the ravines, and the sky was filled with light pink-purple clouds. The outline of the mountain is so distinct, and the light hits the most eye-catching position, that the whole picture looks unreal.
This photo was taken in the Alabama Hills area on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. The peak in the picture is usually considered to be Lone Pine Peak. It belongs to the same Sierra Nevada mountain range as Sequoia and Yosemite, but the shooting location and the two national parks are located on the east and west sides of the mountain range, and the scenery is completely different.
The western slope is longer and gentler, and is dotted with large forests. The giant sequoia forest of Sequoia grows here; the eastern slope is steeper, with the mountain rising rapidly from the valley, and the exposed rock walls and towering ridges are particularly prominent.
Apple’s preference for this mountain range did not end with the Sierra. The default wallpaper of macOS High Sierra released in 2017 was changed to another scenery. It was taken at North Lake in Bishop Creek Canyon on the west side of Bishop, also on the east side of Sierra Nevada. There is still snow on the hillside in the distance, the poplar trees by the lake have turned bright golden yellow, and the calm lake water reflects the woods and mountain peaks. Compared to the photo of Sierra, which emphasizes the outline of the ridge, the colors of High Sierra are richer and more reminiscent of autumn.
Both wallpapers were taken on the east side of Sierra Nevada, along US Highway 395 from the Lone Pine area to Bishop. However, I did not pass these two shooting locations during my self-driving trip. Previously, I took the route on the west side of the mountains, from the giant sequoia forest of Sequoia to Yosemite, and then followed the Tioga Road into the high-altitude mountains of Yosemite.
At Olmsted Point (Olmsted Viewpoint), large areas of light gray granite emerge from the pine forest, and Half Dome and Clouds Rest can be seen in the distance. The rocks here have been eroded by glaciers for a long time, leaving a relatively smooth surface, which is very different from the angular ridges in the Sierra wallpaper.
Continuing on Tioga Road for a short distance, you will come to Tenaya Lake. The water of the lake is clear, with stones scattered on the shore. The coniferous forest and granite peaks on the other side are connected together. Although there are no golden autumn leaves in the High Sierra wallpaper, the scenery of the lake and mountains still reminds me of that familiar desktop.
After leaving Tenaya Lake, I continued east, following Tioga Road over the pass. As the altitude gradually drops, the surrounding forest begins to thin out and the slopes become drier.
After crossing the Sierra Nevada, I came to Mono Lake on the east side of the mountain range. The scenery was obviously different from the Tenaya Lake I had just passed: near were light-colored travertines (tufa) scattered in the water, and in the distance were the open blue lakes and low ridges. My gaze could extend along the lake into the distance.
Mono Lake is a saltwater alkaline lake with no natural outlet. According to California State Parks, the famous travertine on the lakeside was deposited when calcium-rich freshwater springs met carbonate-rich lake water. As the lake water level dropped, the travertine that was originally underwater gradually emerged from the water, forming today’s unique lakeside landscape.
There is a path on the shore leading to the lake. The path is lined with golden-brown grass and yellow flowers. The lake and distant mountains form a long horizontal line in the middle of the picture. If I had to pick a new macOS wallpaper candidate from this trip, Mono Lake would definitely be on the list. After leaving Mono Lake, I continued north along the east side of the Sierra Nevada to another well-known lake: Lake Tahoe.
Tahoe
In 2025, Apple released macOS Tahoe, which also brought a new Liquid Glass design. Windows, toolbars and Dock make extensive use of transparent materials, and the interface will present different visual effects as the background content and light change.
Lake Tahoe is located at the border of California and Nevada. The lake is about 1,900 meters above sea level and is famous for its crystal clear water. The lake water shows a gradient from light green to dark blue at different depths and lights, and the shore is dotted with rounded granite and tall pine trees.
This is also a popular vacation spot for people in the Bay Area. North Tahoe’s travel information says that you can go to the beach and bike here in the summer, and ski in the nearby mountains in the winter.
In addition to enjoying a sunset on Lake Tahoe, I also went to Speedboat Beach on the north shore, which is the lakeshore area shown in the macOS Tahoe live wallpaper.
Standing on the shore, you can see the clear lake water flowing over the rocks on the bottom of the water. It appears light green in the near distance and gradually turns into dark blue in the distance. Pine trees grow along the rocks, and in the distance are mountain peaks.
The sun shines on the rocks and penetrates the clear lake water, reminding me of those translucent windows and toolbars on the Mac. There is a connection between the transparency of the lake and the system interface in my impression.
After leaving Lake Tahoe, I headed west over the Sierra Nevada and arrived at San Francisco on the Pacific coast. What we had seen in the previous days was giant sequoia forests, granite peaks and alpine lakes. Here, the scenery changed again to the coast, cities and bridges across the channel.
Golden Gate
At WWDC in 2026, Apple continued the story about the “macOS naming team” driving a minibus in California to find place names, and the new name finally announced was Golden Gate.
In addition to an abstract pattern, the wallpaper of macOS Golden Gate also contains a real-life scene of the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them was taken from a low position on the coast, with rocks and white waves nearby, an orange-red bridge extending from the shore to the strait, and the distant hillsides shrouded in warm light. Different from the common photos of the Golden Gate Bridge, this wallpaper leaves more images to the rocks and waves on the coast.
At dusk, I came to the viewing point near the Golden Gate Bridge. At first, the bridge body and the road on the shore were still clearly visible. The orange-red bridge tower was very eye-catching on the blue-gray sea.
But after just a few minutes, the sea fog gradually poured into the strait, first covering the distant hillsides, and then even most of the bridge towers disappeared into the gray-white mist. The fog had not completely dissipated until noon the next day.
Sea fog is not uncommon in San Francisco. When the moist air in the Pacific meets the cold sea water, it is easy to form low clouds and fog, and the Golden Gate Strait happens to be a channel for ocean air to enter the San Francisco Bay. The bridge even has a dedicated foghorn to warn nearby ships when visibility is low.
When I looked at the Golden Gate Bridge in photos, I always felt that the two orange-red bridge towers were the most recognizable symbol of San Francisco. Only when I got here did I realize that even if you stand in a position overlooking the entire bridge, you still need a little bit of luck to see it clearly.
Highway 1
After leaving San Francisco, I spent some time in Silicon Valley. If you are interested in the history of personal computers, you can read my previous article “In Silicon Valley, Meet the History of Personal Computers”. Starting from Silicon Valley and continuing south on California Highway 1, the Pacific Ocean became the most common scenery along the road for the next two days.
macOS Monterey 2021 has a change in wallpapers. Although the system is still named after a real location, the default wallpaper is no longer a landscape photo, but an abstract picture composed of pink and purple curves.
I made a short stop in the small town of Monterey. The coast along the 17-Mile Drive in this area is covered with rocks, the waves are constantly beating against the rock walls, and there are tall pine trees and scattered resort hotels on the shore.
There are no neat and smooth curves like those in the abstract wallpaper here, but it is very suitable for walking slowly along the coast.
Although I can’t directly match the scenery in front of me with the photos on the desktop like I did in Yosemite, coming to Monterey still gave me a more concrete impression of the name of this system.
The 2022 macOS Ventura also continues this abstract style. Ventura covers the blue background with a large orange-yellow curved surface, with soft gradients on the edges.
Unfortunately, this time we just passed Ventura along the coast road and didn’t stop specifically. Through the car window, you can see rows of palm trees and open beaches from time to time along the way, with the blue Pacific Ocean in the distance.
Continue south along the coast from Monterey to Big Sur. In 2020, Apple named its new generation Mac operating system macOS Big Sur. This is also a very special year for Mac: the system interface has been significantly redesigned, the icons have been changed to rounded rectangles, the version number has jumped from 10. That set of redesigned windows, brightly colored new icons, and Big Sur’s coastal wallpapers, together with the first-generation M1 Mac, formed my impression of that period.
In my imagination of California Highway 1, Big Sur is the most representative section. The winding road stretches along the cliff, with the Santa Lucia Mountains on one side and the vast Pacific Ocean on the other.
Compared with the open aerial footage in Apple’s wallpaper, the Big Sur seen from a car is much more cramped. The hillsides sometimes obscure the sea, and the road keeps turning, making it difficult to see the entire coast clearly. But it is also driving along these curves that you can feel why the road is built in such a twisty way: the Santa Lucia Mountains extend almost to the seaside, and the road can only follow the mountains and find passages between cliffs and canyons.
As we continued southward along the cliff, the sky had darkened, and the curves of the road began to be illuminated by car lights. The coastline that can still be seen clearly during the day gradually disappears, leaving only a little skylight in the distance and the road extending in front of us. Although I couldn’t capture the same perspective as the Apple wallpaper, the sunset and coastal bends that evening were enough to make me remember Big Sur.
Continuing south, I came to the seaside town of Morro Bay on Highway 1. The most eye-catching landmark here is Morro Rock, a huge volcanic rock mass about 176 meters high, standing alone at the entrance of the bay.
The outline of this huge rock is easily identifiable and can be seen from a great distance. Approaching Morro Rock along the bay trail, the huge rock mass almost occupies the entire field of view, with calm water at your feet, and the trail curves from the shore to the rock. Looking at this scenery, I suddenly felt that if Apple continues to look for the name of macOS along California in the future, Morro Bay seems to be a good choice.
Zooming out, Morro Rock becomes part of the entire bay, and several eye-catching chimneys can be seen in the distance. This is not a natural landscape far away from people, but a seaside town with a port, streets and daily life.
If you really want to take a macOS wallpaper for it, you can focus on the rock itself like Yosemite, or you can include the entire bay in the frame and let the rocks, seawater, and town together form the desktop. At least in my opinion, it is not inferior to the California scenery that has appeared on the Mac.
some regrets
Even if you arrange a self-driving trip for more than a week, it is impossible to visit all the locations that Apple has selected over the past decade or so. One of them is Catalina.
The 2019 macOS Catalina is named after Santa Catalina Island southwest of Los Angeles, and the default wallpaper overlooks the coast of the northwest tip of the island from the air. Steep hillsides jut into the Pacific Ocean, the water appears bright purple-red on the shore, and the outline of the island stands out against the deep blue water.
Catalina seems not far from Los Angeles, but getting to the island requires taking a boat from a port in Southern California, and then arranging intra-island transportation or hiking. It is obviously not a place that can be reached along the road.
Another place I missed was Sonoma, just north of San Francisco. After two consecutive generations of abstract designs in Monterey and Ventura, Apple has returned to the real California landscape, and it is no longer just a static photo. Sonoma’s vineyards appear on the lock screen as an aerial video, which gradually stops and transitions to the desktop background after logging in.
Sonoma County is located north of San Francisco. In addition to its famous wine producing areas, it also has redwood forests, coasts and mountains. The vineyard chosen by Apple has neatly arranged pergolas. As the camera slowly moves forward, the originally flat fields also show undulating terrain. While previous wallpapers allowed people to remember a fixed moment, Sonoma allows people to briefly travel through the scenery along the camera’s perspective.
The 2018 macOS Mojave is also a generation system that impressed me deeply. Apple brought a complete Dark Mode to the Mac and also launched a Dynamic Desktop. The default wallpaper is taken from the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley. The wallpaper will change with the system time, showing the different scenes of the same sand dune from day to night.
Mojave’s dunes are just rolling ridges of sand and distant peaks, perfect for showing the changing light. During the day, the sunlight leaves a sharp distinction between light and dark on the dunes; at night, the same terrain takes on completely different colors. Although it seems today that this effect of switching wallpapers based on time is not new, when I used it for the first time, I still felt that there were some different changes in the Mac desktop.
From Mojave’s dynamic desktop, to Catalina’s island scenery, to Sonoma’s aerial videos, Apple is constantly changing the way Mac displays these places. The earliest wallpaper was just a still photo, but now lock screens, screensavers and desktops can be connected into a continuous image. It’s a bit of a pity that I didn’t go to places like Catalina, Sonoma or Mojave this time, but it also left me with a few clear destinations for future trips to California.
postscript
The earliest generations of Mac OS X used an Aqua-style blue abstract background. The desktops of Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther and Tiger are constantly changing, but always revolve around blue curves, gloss and water waves, which is in perfect harmony with the Aqua interface that was full of transparent materials and highlight effects at the time. When it came to Leopard, the default wallpaper turned to the universe and starry sky, and then Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion also continued this theme.
| Mac OS X Tiger：Aqua | Mac OS X Leopard: Starry Sky |
|---|---|
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Early Mac OS That changed with 2013’s OS X Mavericks. Apple began naming its Mac operating system after places in California, which also established a direct connection between the system name and the real scenery in the default wallpaper. Even though Monterey and Ventura adopted abstract wallpaper, the tradition of California’s place-name naming system continued.
After actually completing this lap, I came back with many more photos than I expected before setting off. On the evening of the day I returned to Los Angeles, I came to Santa Monica and caught the last sunset of this trip. The sun was slowly sinking towards the Pacific Ocean, the sea surface was dyed orange-gold, and cars were still coming and going on the road behind them. I’ve traveled from Los Angeles through mountains, forests, and coasts, and now I’m back here. The places marked on the map before departure have now become memories during the journey and remain in the camera.
When I was sorting through the photos after I got home, I took another look at the scenery along the way. From the giant sequoia forests of Sequoia, to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, to the beaches of the Pacific Coast, each place reminds me of a moment in my travels. I will look through the photos of Yosemite several times without realizing it. At that time, I just thought the Half Dome in the wallpaper was beautiful. I never thought that more than ten years later, I would actually stay at the foot of it for a night.
Many of my photos are not from the angles in the Apple wallpaper. For example, in this photo, the mountain peaks do not fill the frame. The woods on the river bank have also darkened. The water surface reflects the distant rock walls and sky. This is the scenery I saw in Yosemite that day.
Then change to the Yosemite wallpaper, and the photo from more than ten years ago is still on the screen. But I was reminded not only of the majestic silhouette of Half Dome, but also of the night we camped in Upper Pines and the scenery we saw walking along the river.
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