Apple Seeds Sonata Final Candidate 4

"You'll notice a much shorter list of bugs fixed in this release. We also hope you'll notice the substantial reduction of unfixed bugs!," Holmes said. "Please treat this build as if it were the GM build of the OS and test it throughout."

From recent trends, and the status of the current release, it appears that Final Candidate 5 will be the most likely candidate to be selected as Golden Master. Rarely has Apple ventured into Final Candidates beyond this point.

Mac OS 9.0 is expected to officially debut during the week of October 23rd, sources say. In the meantime, large advertisements for the release have started to appear in various locations on the west coast. Applications that take advantage of Mac OS 9.0, such as Outlook Express 5.0, are also expected to debut at this time.