Newshot Article title: From Yosemite to Golden Gate: Touring California with macOS
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Special Note
The research, fact-checking, and writing of this article were completed by me personally. After the draft was finished, I used the GPT 6.1 Sol model to polish some paragraphs.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this article were taken by the author on site; sources for external images are noted in the corresponding captions. Image copyright belongs to the original rights holders; downloading from archives does not imply an open license.
If you have questions or thoughts about the content, fellow SSPAI readers are welcome to leave comments and discuss in the comment section.
Origin
When I started planning a U.S. West Coast road trip, I found that the so-called "U.S. West Loop" has no fixed route. Some people start from Las Vegas and travel through the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and the national parks of Utah; others start from San Francisco and head south along the Pacific coast, leaving more time for the seaside towns and coastal scenery along the way.
Each route has its own appeal, but for me, the scenery I most wanted to see on this trip was very clear: the magnificent granite cliffs of Yosemite, the rolling mountains of the Sierra Nevada, and California's long Pacific coastline.
My longing for these places began long ago. I have been using a Mac for the past dozen years or so, and these California place names have long been etched into my memory through generation after generation of macOS. Starting with Mavericks in 2013, Apple went on to name its operating systems after places such as Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur, bringing the scenery of these places to the desktops of countless Mac users.
Among these California landscapes, the one I longed for most was still Yosemite. After OS X Yosemite was released in 2014, the default wallpaper featuring Half Dome made me remember this place; countless times I saw this granite peak bathed in sunset light on my screen.
With these expectations, I settled on a loop itinerary in California: starting from Los Angeles, heading north through Sequoia and Yosemite, then crossing the Sierra Nevada to Lake Tahoe, afterward going to San Francisco to see Golden Gate, then to Silicon Valley, and finally heading south along Highway 1, returning to Los Angeles via Monterey, Big Sur, and Ventura. This route also strings together the locations corresponding to the names of several Mac operating systems from the past dozen years.
Basic Apple Guy researched the locations where the wallpapers were shot in "macOS California Camino," while Andrew Levitt specifically took a helicopter to find the viewing angle closest to the Big Sur wallpaper. However, I did not intend to turn this trip into a mere mission to find wallpaper camera positions. The Mojave Desert, Catalina Island, and the actual shooting locations of quite a few versions of the wallpapers are all not part of this itinerary.
My journey began in Los Angeles. After leaving the city, both sides of the highway gradually turned into vast golden hills. In October, the California sunshine was still abundant, and the road surface looked especially bright under the strong sunlight.
As the car continued north, the scenery along the way began to change slowly. Open grassy slopes gradually gave way to mountains, the highway kept climbing, and the woods became denser and denser. A few hours later, I entered the first national park of this trip—Sequoia.
Sequoia
macOS Sequoia, released in 2024, brought the giant sequoia forest to the Mac desktop. Unlike past landscape wallpapers that were mainly static photographs, Sequoia presented this forest through a dynamic sequence moving through the trees. The camera slowly moves forward, sunlight filters down through the tall canopy, and giant sequoias pass by on both sides of the frame, making it easier to intuitively feel the depth and grandeur of this forest.
The size of giant sequoias is far more exaggerated than what you see in photos. Before coming here, I knew that giant sequoias are among the largest trees in the world by volume, and I had seen many photos of tourists standing beneath them.
When those thick reddish-brown trunks actually appeared before my eyes, it was still hard to immediately form a sense of their size.
Looking back at the photos, the layering between the trunks and the surrounding vegetation is still there, but the enormous scale I felt when standing beneath the trees and looking up is hard to convey through photographs. Apple used a moving camera to show the depth of the giant sequoia forest, while my photos can only record one angle of it.
I did not find information sufficient to confirm the exact shooting location of the original footage, nor could I determine whether it belongs to the same forest area as the Giant Forest I visited, but for me this forest left a very deep impression.
After leaving Giant Forest, I continued north past Grant Grove in Kings Canyon National Park, then drove toward Yosemite.
The scenery along the way also gradually changed. Beyond the dense forest, more exposed light gray rock walls began to appear. The highway rose and fell along the mountain slopes, and occasionally from high points I could see layered ridges in the distance. Unlike the giant sequoias that required standing beneath them and looking up, the scenery here began to open up, and my line of sight could extend farther.
From the moment I entered Sequoia, I was already within the Sierra Nevada. This mountain system, stretching for hundreds of kilometers, not only nurtured the giant sequoia forests but also shaped the highly recognizable granite valleys of Yosemite. The two national parks are not far apart yet have completely different landscapes: in Sequoia, what is most astonishing is the size of the trees; but in Yosemite, what truly fills the view will be those towering rock walls.
Yosemite
The first time I heard the name Yosemite was in the biography of Steve Jobs, where the book mentioned that Jobs had held his wedding in "Yosemite." Compared with the direct transliteration "约塞米蒂," I was more impressed by the Chinese translation "优胜美地." It uses four rather poetic Chinese characters, making it easy to associate with a place of clear mountains and beautiful waters, a scenic spot with lovely scenery.
OS X Yosemite in 2014 was also the generation of Mac system that left the deepest impression on me. Apple redesigned almost the entire OS X interface. The previous Mavericks still retained quite a lot of skeuomorphic design, while Yosemite's windows became cleaner, the Dock and app icons took on a flat style, and the system also began to use translucency extensively, with the overall style clearly moving closer to iOS 7 released the previous year.
Looking at that interface now, it no longer feels novel, but I always remember the stunning feeling when I first saw it, and that wallpaper of Half Dome at sunset. This wallpaper is said to have been shot by landscape photographer Jim Patterson, and many Yosemite landscape photos can also be seen on his personal website. The photo Apple chose did not show the entire Yosemite Valley, but focused the lens on Half Dome, with the massive granite mountain body showing a faint pink-orange hue under the sunset.
This wallpaper accompanied me for a long time. Every time I opened my MacBook, Half Dome appeared on the desktop. This time, coming to Yosemite Valley, I finally had the chance to stay one night at the foot of the mountain. I chose the Upper Pines campground deep in the valley, surrounded by tall pine trees, where I could look up and see Half Dome in the distance.
Article title: From Yosemite to the Golden Gate Bridge: Touring California with macOS
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In the evening, the setting sun tints the summit with warm colors while the rock face below has already faded into shadow; the next morning, sunlight once again illuminates this familiar peak.
Although I didn't deliberately seek out the spot where Apple shot its wallpaper, simply seeing Half Dome at different times of day made the night of camping feel worthwhile.
Although the light and composition of the Half Dome summit I saw were completely different from the wallpaper, the outline where the rounded dome meets the steep rock face is still easy to recognize.
The shape of Half Dome is tied to the geological history of Yosemite Valley. The area is dominated by granitic rock, and early river erosion together with later glaciation shaped the valley's form. Half Dome looks as if half of it has been sheared away, but its formation also involves rock fractures and exfoliation—it cannot simply be understood as a glacier cutting off half a mountain.
Half Dome is not Yosemite's only impressive granite wall; in the same valley there is another equally famous landmark.
El Capitan
A year after Yosemite's release, the next generation of OS X did not move on to a new national park—it didn't even leave Yosemite Valley. Apple simply narrowed the system's name from the whole of Yosemite down to one of its iconic granite cliffs: El Capitan.
The two wallpapers are framed very differently as well. Yosemite pulls Half Dome in close to the center of the frame, while El Capitan shows a broader valley view. Looking out from Tunnel View, El Capitan rises on the left, Bridalveil Fall is on the right, and Half Dome can be seen in the distance. The peak that had been enlarged the previous year until it nearly filled the screen recedes back into the depths of the valley here.
On this trip I also visited Tunnel View. Standing on the overlook, the scene before me closely resembled the familiar wallpaper—only without the snow and the warm sunset light; the valley was covered in deep green forest, and clouds were piling up above the peaks. El Capitan stood on the left, its massive rock face looking especially bright in the sunlight.
When I drove down to the valley floor and looked up at El Capitan from close range, I found it even more spectacular than it appeared from afar. The entire pale granite wall rises from behind the trees, standing about 900 meters above the valley floor, its surface covered with slender cracks and dark water stains.
Seen from Tunnel View, it is just a huge rock on the left side of the valley; only when you actually stand near its base do you realize that the trees—so inconspicuous in photographs—become the most intuitive reference for judging the height of the rock face.
El Capitan is also one of the classic climbing destinations that climbers around the world dream of. On June 3, 2017, climber Alex Honnold ascended this nearly 900-meter granite wall via the Freerider route without ropes or any protective gear, in just 3 hours and 56 minutes, becoming the first person to accomplish the feat. The climb was documented in the film Free Solo, which later won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Oscars.
Standing at the base of the valley looking up at El Capitan, I couldn't help but think of the scenes in the film where Alex clings to the rock face with only his fingers and toes. I also used my phone's telephoto lens to photograph people climbing on the wall. From a distance, the climbers are just inconspicuous specks on the pale rock face—if you don't look carefully, they are hard to spot at all.
After El Capitan in 2015, Apple set its sights on the broader Sierra Nevada in the next generation of its system. In 2016, OS X was officially renamed macOS, and the new system's name shifted from a single cliff in a valley to an entire mountain range stretching hundreds of kilometers: Sierra.
Sierra
macOS Sierra chose a highly representative mountain landscape as its default wallpaper. The setting sun dyes the jagged ridgeline orange-red, the rock faces on the shaded side take on a cool gray, snow still lingers in the gullies, and pale pink-purple clouds drift across the sky. The outline of the peak is so distinct, and the light falls precisely on the most striking spot, that the whole image looks almost unreal.
This photo was taken in the Alabama Hills area on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, and the peak in the image is generally believed to be Lone Pine Peak. This area belongs to the same Sierra Nevada range as Sequoia and Yosemite, but this shooting location and the two national parks lie on opposite sides of the mountains, east and west, and the scenery is completely different.
The western slope is longer and gentler, covered with vast forests—this is where Sequoia's giant sequoia groves grow; the eastern slope is steeper, with the mountains rising abruptly from the valley floor, making the bare rock faces and towering ridges stand out all the more.
Apple's fondness for this mountain range did not end with Sierra. The default wallpaper of macOS High Sierra, released in 2017, switched to a different scene: it was shot at North Lake in Bishop Creek Canyon, west of Bishop, also on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. Snow still remains on the distant slopes, the aspens by the lake have turned bright golden yellow, and the calm water reflects the trees and peaks. Compared with the Sierra image, which emphasizes the ridgeline, High Sierra's colors are richer and more evocative of autumn.
Both wallpaper locations are on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada, and along US Route 395 you can travel from the Lone Pine area to Bishop. However, my road trip this time did not pass through either of these shooting locations. I had taken the route on the western side of the range, going from Sequoia's giant sequoia groves to Yosemite, and then along Tioga Road into Yosemite's high-elevation country.
At Olmsted Point, broad expanses of pale gray granite emerge from among the pine trees, and Half Dome and Clouds Rest can be seen in the distance. The rock here has been eroded by glaciers over a long period, leaving relatively smooth surfaces—very different from the sharply angular ridges in the Sierra wallpaper.
A short drive further along Tioga Road brought me to Tenaya Lake. The water is clear, rocks are scattered along the shore, and the coniferous forest and granite peaks on the opposite shore merge into one continuous scene. Although there were no golden autumn leaves like in the High Sierra wallpaper, the sight of the lake accompanied by the mountains still reminded me of that familiar desktop.
After leaving Tenaya Lake, I continued east, crossing the pass along Tioga Road. As the elevation gradually dropped, the surrounding forest began to thin out and the slopes grew drier.
The article title: From Yosemite to Golden Gate: Touring California with macOS
Body: After crossing the Sierra Nevada, I arrived at Mono Lake on the eastern side of the range. The scenery here is noticeably different from the Tenaya Lake I had just passed: up close are pale tufa formations scattered in the water, and in the distance an open blue lake surface meets low ridges, with the eye able to follow the water all the way to the far shore.
Mono Lake is a saline alkaline lake with no natural outlet. According to California State Parks, the famous tufa along the shore forms when calcium-rich freshwater springs meet the carbonate-rich lake water and deposit material; as the lake level drops, tufa that was once underwater gradually emerges, creating today's distinctive shoreline.
A small trail by the shore leads down to the lake, lined with golden-brown grass and yellow flowers, while the water and distant mountains form a long horizontal line across the middle of the view. If I were 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 eastern side of the Sierra Nevada toward another well-known lake: Lake Tahoe.
Tahoe
In 2025, Apple released macOS Tahoe, bringing with it the all-new Liquid Glass design. Windows, toolbars, and the Dock make heavy use of translucent materials, and the interface takes on different visual effects as the background content and light change.
Lake Tahoe sits on the border between California and Nevada, with the lake surface at an elevation of about 1,900 meters, and is known for its clear water. Depending on depth and light, the water shifts through gradients from pale green to deep blue, while rounded granite boulders and tall pines are scattered along the shore.
This is also a favorite vacation spot for Bay Area residents. Travel information for North Tahoe notes that in summer you can visit the beaches and go cycling, while in winter you can ski on the nearby mountains.
Besides watching a sunset by the shore of Lake Tahoe, I also visited Speedboat Beach on the north shore, the stretch of shoreline depicted in the macOS Tahoe photographic wallpaper.
Standing on the shore, you can see the clear water washing over the rocks below, appearing pale turquoise up close and gradually turning deep blue farther out. Pines grow along the rocks, with a chain of peaks in the distance.
Sunlight falls on the rocks and also penetrates the clear water, reminding me of those translucent windows and toolbars on the Mac. The transparency of the lake water and the system interface became linked in my mind.
After leaving Lake Tahoe, I headed west across the Sierra Nevada and arrived in San Francisco on the Pacific coast. The previous days had been filled with giant sequoia forests, granite peaks, and alpine lakes; here, the scenery shifted back to coastline, city, and a bridge spanning the strait.
Golden Gate
At WWDC 2026, Apple continued the story of the "macOS naming team" driving a minibus around California in search of place names, and finally announced the new name: Golden Gate.
The macOS Golden Gate wallpapers include, besides an abstract design, photographic scenes of the Golden Gate Bridge. One of them is shot from low along the coast, with rocks and white surf in the foreground, the orange-red bridge extending from the shore out over the strait, and the hillsides in the distance bathed in warm light. Unlike the usual Golden Gate Bridge photos, this wallpaper gives more of the frame to the coastal rocks and waves.
At dusk I arrived at a viewpoint near the Golden Gate Bridge. At first the bridge and the coastal road were still clearly visible, the orange-red towers standing out sharply against the blue-gray sea.
But within just a few minutes, sea fog began pouring into the strait, first obscuring the distant hillsides, then swallowing most of the towers in gray-white mist. By noon the next day, the fog still had not fully cleared.
Sea fog is not unusual in San Francisco. Moist air over the Pacific meets cold seawater, easily forming low clouds and fog, and the Golden Gate strait happens to be a channel through which ocean air enters San Francisco Bay. The bridge even has foghorns specifically to warn nearby vessels when visibility is low.
Seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in photos before, I always felt those two orange-red towers were San Francisco's most recognizable landmark. Only after actually coming here did I realize that even standing at a spot overlooking the whole bridge, you need a bit of luck to see it clearly.
Highway 1
After leaving San Francisco, I spent some time in Silicon Valley. If you're interested in the history of the personal computer, you can read my previous article, "In Silicon Valley, Encountering Personal Computer History." Setting out from Silicon Valley and continuing south onto California Highway 1, the Pacific became the most constant sight alongside the road for the next two days.
macOS Monterey in 2021 marked a change in wallpapers. Although the system was still named after a real place, the default wallpaper was no longer a landscape photo but an abstract image made of pink-purple curves.
I made a brief stop in the town of Monterey. Along the 17-Mile Drive in this area, the coast is full of rocks, with waves constantly pounding the cliffs, tall pines along the shore, and scattered resort hotels.
There are none of those neat, flowing curves from the abstract wallpaper here, but it is a great place to drive slowly along the coast, stopping as you go.
Although I couldn't directly match the scenery before me with the photo on the desktop the way I could with Yosemite, visiting Monterey still gave me a more concrete impression of this system name.
macOS Ventura in 2022 continued this abstract style, with Ventura using large orange-yellow curved surfaces over a blue background, with soft gradients along the edges.
Unfortunately, this time I only passed through Ventura along the coastal highway and didn't make a dedicated stop. Through the car window, I could occasionally see rows of palm trees and open beaches, with the deep blue Pacific beyond.
Continuing south along the coast from Monterey, I drove all the way to Big Sur. In 2020, Apple named its new generation Mac operating system macOS Big Sur. This was also a special year for the Mac: the system interface received a major redesign, icons were unified into rounded rectangles, the version number jumped from the 10.x that had lasted nearly twenty years to 11, and the Apple Silicon transition officially began. That redesigned set of windows, the vividly colored new icons, and the Big Sur coastal wallpaper, 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 stretch. The winding road hugs the cliffs, with the Santa Lucia Mountains on one side and the vast Pacific on the other.
Compared with the sweeping aerial views in Apple's wallpapers, Big Sur as seen from inside a car feels much more confined. The hillsides sometimes block the sea, the road keeps turning, and it's not easy to take in the whole stretch of coast. But it is precisely by driving along these curves that you can feel why the road was built so winding: the Santa Lucia Mountains run almost all the way to the sea, so the road can only follow the terrain, finding a path between cliffs and canyons.
As I continued south along the cliffs, the sky had already darkened, and the curves of the road began to be lit by headlights. The coastline that had been visible during the day gradually disappeared, leaving only a bit of skylight in the distance and the road stretching on ahead. Although I couldn't capture the same viewpoint as Apple's wallpaper, the sunset glow and the coastal curves that evening were enough to make me remember Big Sur.
Continuing south, I arrived at Morro Bay, a small seaside town on Highway 1. Its most striking landmark is Morro Rock, a massive volcanic rock about 176 meters tall standing alone at the entrance to the bay.
The outline of this giant rock is easy to recognize and can be seen from far away. Walking along the bay trail toward Morro Rock, the massive rock fills almost the entire view, with calm water at your feet and the trail curving from the shore toward the rock. Looking at this scene, it suddenly occurred to me that if Apple were to continue searching California for macOS names in the future, Morro Bay might be a pretty good choice too.
Pulling back for a wider view, Morro Rock becomes part of the whole bay, with several striking smokestacks visible in the distance. This is not a natural landscape far from human habitation, but a seaside town with a harbor, streets, and everyday life.
If a macOS wallpaper were really to be made of it, you could focus the lens on the giant rock itself, as with Yosemite, or take in the entire bay, letting the rock, the water, and the town together form the desktop. At least in my view, this place is fully on par with those California landscapes that have already appeared on the Mac.
Some Regrets
Even with more than a week of driving, it's impossible to visit every place Apple has chosen over the past decade or so. One of them is Catalina.
macOS Catalina in 2019 was named after Santa Catalina Island, southwest of Los Angeles, and its default wallpaper is an aerial view of the island's northwestern coast. Steep hillsides plunge into the Pacific, the water near the shore glows a bright purplish-red, and the island's outline stands out sharply against the deep blue sea.
Catalina looks close to Los Angeles, but getting to the island requires taking a boat from a Southern California harbor and then arranging transportation or hiking on the island, so it's clearly not a place you can reach simply by driving along the highway.
Another place I missed was Sonoma, north of San Francisco. After two consecutive generations of abstract design with Monterey and Ventura, Apple returned to real California scenery, and no longer just a static photo. Sonoma's vineyards appear on the lock screen as an aerial video; after logging in, the image gradually comes to a stop and transitions into the desktop background.
Sonoma County lies north of San Francisco and, besides its famous wine region, also has redwood forests, coastline, and mountains. The vineyard Apple chose has neatly arranged trellises, and as the camera slowly moves forward, the previously flat fields reveal their rolling terrain. Earlier wallpapers made you remember a fixed moment, while Sonoma lets you briefly travel through the landscape along the camera's viewpoint.
macOS Mojave in 2018 was also a system generation that left a deep impression on me. Apple brought a full Dark Mode to the Mac and also introduced Dynamic Desktop. The default wallpaper was shot at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley, and the wallpaper changes with the system time, showing the same dunes under different light from day to night.
Article title: From Yosemite to the Golden Gate Bridge: Touring California with macOS
Body: Mojave's dunes have only rolling sand ridges and distant peaks, making them well suited to showing changes in light. During the day, sunlight leaves sharp boundaries of light and shadow on the dunes; at night, the same terrain takes on entirely different colors. Although today this effect of switching wallpapers based on the time of day no longer seems novel, the first time I used it back then it still made me feel that the Mac desktop had changed in some way.
From Mojave's dynamic desktop to Catalina's island scenery and then Sonoma's aerial videos, Apple has also kept changing the way the Mac presents these places. The earliest wallpapers were just a still photo; today's lock screen, screen saver, and desktop can connect into a continuous sequence of imagery. Not visiting places such as Catalina, Sonoma, or Mojave this time was somewhat regrettable, but it also left several clear destinations for future California trips.
Afterword
The earliest generations of Mac OS X used Aqua-style blue abstract backgrounds. The desktops of Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger kept changing, but always revolved around blue curves, gloss, and water ripples, fitting in well with the Aqua interface of the time, which was full of translucent materials and highlight effects. By Leopard, the default wallpaper shifted to the universe and starry skies, and Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion subsequently continued this theme.
Early Mac OS X was not lacking in nature photography either. The system's built-in Desktop Pictures folder always contained a large number of plant, rock, ocean, and mountain photographs, but users would not associate a desktop with a particular generation of operating system just by seeing one. OS X Mavericks in 2013 changed that. Apple began naming Mac operating systems after California place names, also establishing a direct connection between system names and the real landscapes in the default wallpapers. Even though Monterey and Ventura used abstract wallpapers, the tradition of naming systems after California place names has always continued.
After actually completing this loop, I brought back far more photos than I had expected before setting out. On the evening of the day I returned to Los Angeles, I went to Santa Monica and caught the last sunset of the trip. The sun was slowly sinking toward the Pacific, the sea was tinted with a layer of orange-gold, and traffic on the road behind me was still flowing. I had set out from Los Angeles and passed through mountains, forests, and coastline, and now I had returned here. The places I had marked on the map before departure have now all become memories from the journey, and have also remained in my camera.
When I sorted through the photos after getting home, I looked back through the scenery along the route again. From the giant sequoia groves of Sequoia to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and then to the beaches along the Pacific coast, each place reminded me of a certain moment during the trip. I found myself flipping several times through the photos from Yosemite. Back then I had only thought Half Dome in the wallpaper looked beautiful, and I never expected that more than ten years later I would actually spend a night at the foot of it.
Many of my photos are not from the angles used in Apple's wallpapers. For example, in this photo the peaks do not fill the frame, the trees on the riverbank have already grown dark, and the water reflects the distant rock walls and sky. This is the scenery I saw in Yosemite that day.
Switching to the Yosemite wallpaper again, the screen still shows the same photo from more than ten years ago. But what I remember is not only Half Dome's magnificent outline, but also that night camping at Upper Pines, and the scenery I saw while walking along the river.
- 512 Pixels: Archive of default wallpapers across generations
- Basic Apple Guy: macOS California Camino
- Andrew Levitt: Big Sur wallpaper recreation
- Jim Patterson: Yosemite landscape photography
- U.S. National Park Service: The geology of Yosemite
- U.S. National Park Service: Rock formations and landmarks of Yosemite
- California State Parks: Mono Lake Tufa State Natural Reserve
- North Lake Tahoe: North Lake Tahoe travel guide (PDF)
- "Encountering Personal Computer History in Silicon Valley"
- Catalina Island Tourism Bureau: Island and transportation information
- Sonoma County Tourism: Travel itineraries
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