14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is developing both OS X 10.8.4 and OS X 10.9 in parallel, but only one will be showcased at WWDC in June. The other, an incremental effort, will be delivered via Software Update.
By now you’ve probably guessed which one is going to be a simple click-through update on your Mac. Naturally, it’s OS X 10.8.4, the fourth incremental release of Apple’s Mountain Lion operating system.
With several betas seeded over the course of a month, the update is quite probably the last maintenance release for Mountain Lion, before Apple unveils its all-new Mac OS in June.
Macnn claims to have a “feature list” of the software, describing various new features and fixes that are coming in this update. A breakdown of said features can be found below.
OS X 10.8.4 features (so far):
- support for an upcoming networking protocol, 802.11ac, also known as 5G WiFi (which implies the release of new Macintosh hardware as well); - slight improvements to battery life on MacBook computers; - Wi-Fi wake-from-sleep reconnection issues; - fixes for graphical glitches caused by some NVIDIA cards; - better Microsoft Exchange compatibility; - VoiceOver compatibility with text in PDF documents; - a new version of Safari (6.0.5); - a fix for FaceTime issues with non-US-style phone numbers; - a fix that prevents scheduled sleep times; - drivers for Geforce GTX Titan graphics card.
OS X 10.8.4 should be released sometime in the next few weeks. Apple is likely to introduce the update before OS X 10.9, or even in tandem with the new Mac OS.
It wouldn’t be unheard of to see a simultaneous release of both pieces of software, should certain new features be introduced that require cross-OS compatibility (as was the case of FaceTime two years ago).