Kasper JadeLess than two weeks after releasing Mac OS X 10.3.6, Apple is already circulating builds of a successive update to its Panther OS.
According to the usual suspects, the first pre-release builds of Mac OS X 10.3.7 belong to the '7S20x' milestone and arrive in the form of a 15MB Mac OS X image. The software requires approximately 50MB for installation.
While details surrounding these very early builds are scant, sources say Mac OS X 10.3.7 will deliver enhancements to FireWire Audio, OpenGL, CoreGraphics, Multicast DNS, mLAN Audio, CoreFoundation, and AppKit.
The update is also said to include revisions to the Mach Kernel, PDF and PostScript rendering, ATI Radeon graphics drivers (8500, 9700), and Nvidia GeForce graphics drivers (3, 2MX, FX).
Although there have been wide-spread reports that the recently released Mac OS X 10.3.6 Update has re-introduced data loss bugs for users with external Firewire drives, the Mac OS X 10.3.7 Update shows no signs of an immediate fix. Withal, Apple is reportedly working on a solution to this problem, which appears to be affecting FireWire drives based on the Oxford 922 and 911 chipsets.
Mac OS X 10.3.7 is expected to be released by year's end, meanwhile developers should begin receiving builds of the system update sometime in the next few weeks.
Charles Martin
Wesley Hilliard
Marko Zivkovic
Malcolm Owen
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
18 Comments
an update with low level changes in OS suggests new hardware support... Let's skip Christmas and just take us to January 11th 2005 now!
New hardware requires a few specific things that don't look to be included in this update. Simply updating the kernel won't do it.
This data loss problem is getting out of hand. A firewire hard drive is what I use to back up my data. I shouldn't have to be scared about plugging it in.
This data loss problem is getting out of hand. A firewire hard drive is what I use to back up my data. I shouldn't have to be scared about plugging it in.
No kidding. I boot off an external hard drive. In fact, right now it's my *only* drive. For some inexplicable reason, a complete external drive enclosure is less than 1/3 the cost of a simple Mac IDE card ( ), so I went that route when I needed a new drive and the 160GB drives were on sale. Now I've gotta worry about having an unusable computer if I update my OS. This is a PC kind of problem, and us Mac users shouldn't have to deal with it.
i just bought a slick external firewire case for 3.5" hard drives, and i am waiting for prices to drop a little more before placing an order. i want to use the drive to back up my internal drives, and periodically transfer the whole mess to offline optical media. but i have heard of these data loss issues, and want to feel a bit more confident about the idea before i invest in it.