AppleInsider Staff
Apple on Thursday seeded build 12D74 of its OS X 10.8.3 Mountain Lion update to developers, the latest in a string of betas since the first build was released in November of last year.
Build 12D74 comes weeks after Apple released the tenth beta earlier in February, which resolved an obscure detection bug that caused many OS X apps to crash when the phrase "F:///" is typed into a text field.
People with knowledge of the beta have informed AppleInsider that, as with the past few beta builds, the most recent comes with no known issues and asks developers to focus on the same five areas: AirPlay, AirPort, Game Center, Graphics Drivers and Safari.
The news comes on the heels of a continued reports of increased traffic from Macs running the as-yet-unannounced OS X 10.9, which suggests an unveiling of the next-gen operating system could be imminent.
While the latest seed comes more than three months after developers first began beta testing OS X 10.8.3, AppleInsider traffic logs are already showing the presence of Macs running an OS X 10.9, suggesting an unveiling could occur soon. Apple first announced OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion over a year ago on Feb. 16, 2012.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
9 Comments
What the hell are they doing with this point upgrade?
What the hell are they doing with this point upgrade?
Testing it.
They have a new way of distributing beta versions of the OS now, the Mac App Store itself can do it. They may have decided to leverage this to do more betas than in the past, in which case it's always going to be like this from now on. In Ubuntu you can choose to point your updater at an older-but-stable or a newer-but-unstable branch, and this is kind of analogous to that, but Apple have decided only developers are allowed to use the unstable branch. Or maybe (and this is what I hope) they have decided to "get serious" and knock off like 100 Radars in 1 release.
Testing it.
They've been testing this update since November. Not that it really matters to me, but this is a little ridiculous. There better not be any major issues with this update.
My concern is if there is an issue down the road...am I going to have to wait 4-5 months for a fix because they want to keep releasing betas of the next update?
I've been reading various sites. Lion only went as far as 10.7.5, not long after we had Mountain Lion. Could it be Lynx is in the not too distant future.