14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is offering developers the latest Snow Leopard beta with an identical set of focus areas and no known issues, suggesting a final release may be just around the corner.
Mac OS X 10.6.7 Build 10J869 comes with almost no changes whatsoever, as the seed notes list identical focus areas to those of previous betas - Safari, the Mac App Store, Bonjour, SMB, and Graphics Drivers - as well as no known issues.
Developers allowed to download the eighth Mac OS X 10.6.7 build say that it is a 476.1MB delta download, with the combo package weighing in at just over 1 gigabyte.
Available to select members of Apple's Mac developer program, the new build suggests the final Mac OS X 10.6.7 release is closing in.
While not very predictable, Apple’s development cycles generally end with successive beta builds bearing similar or identical seed notes, the latest such seeds being no different.
Apple is known to be focusing on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, as the OS is scheduled to ship this summer.
Mac OS X 10.6.7 may well be the last Snow Leopard incremental update for a while (or for good), though this is not a must.
The last time Apple updated Snow Leopard was this January when the Cupertino-based tech giant rolled out Mac OS X 10.6.6.
The new release, mainly tasked with adding the Mac App Store application on supported systems, delivered the usual bag of code corrections and tweaks, as well as security fixes.
Version 10.6.7 of Snow Leopard should be no different from this standpoint, though Apple is not expected to introduce any major new features in this seventh incremental update to its desktop operating system.
If we were to guess when Mac OS X 10.6.7 was scheduled to ship, we would say no later than next week.
Apple has also patched a number of vulnerabilities in iTunes and Safari. These fixes will be incorporated in the final 10.6.7 release as well.