OS X 10.5.6 Playing Hard to Get

Penned in for a Friday release by various well placed sources, Mac OS X 10.5.6 was said to encompass over 150 bug fixes, weighing in at close to 300MB. While some of these claims are most likely accurate, one of them sure proved to be just the opposite.

Yes, we are talking about the alleged release date of Mac OS X 10.5.6, the latest maintenance and security update scheduled for Leopard users worldwide. As it turned out, last week Apple just wasn't in the mood to give 10.5.6 the green light, despite the fact that all signs pointed to an imminent release.

Last week, one report caught our eye with the source acknowledging that Apple had seeded yet another build of Mac OS X 10.5.6 to developers. The seed notes listed the build as issue-free, just like the build before it, suggesting development was coming along nicely. Apple was also known to have (allegedly) addressed a few outstanding issues between the release of OS X 10.5.6 builds 9G52 and 9G55 (the latest build seeded to developers, as far as we knew then, and still know now).

However, the source later claimed to have learned that Apple had “started distributing this particular seed internally outside of the usual developer circles. This would indicate that this is the final version of Mac OS X 10.5.6 before public release,” the report said. “...The new version would be made available to the public on Friday, and this new information certainly makes that plausible,” the author stressed, adding that the update should be available for free to all Mac OS X 10.5 users. As you can see, OS X 10.5.6 is nowhere to be found.

We had mentioned earlier that day that Mac OS X 10.5.6 might indeed be close to its public release, with both the Client and the Server versions carrying the same build number – 9G55, according to other reports. The Server version was also issue-free, as far as testers could tell. What should have actually indicated that 10.5.6 was just around the corner (and should have proven right), was that 9G55 included almost no changes since the last seeded beta build - 9G52. Unfortunately, we now have to seek even more "solid" evidence that 10.5.6 is, or isn't close to an official release to the public.