the initial beta release of macOS Big Sur referred to its version as "10.16", and when upgrading from prior versions of macOS using the Software Update mechanism to early beta releases, the version referred to was "10.16". An exception to this was the Developer Transition Kit, which always reported the system version as "11.0". macOS Big Sur started reporting the system version as "11.0" on all Macs as of the third beta release.

To maintain backwards compatibility, macOS Big Sur identified