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Mac OS X Tiger Goes Gold
bonch writes "Following up yesterday's story, AppleInsider now reports that Tiger build 8A428 has been deemed the Gold Master for shipping. Sources expect an announcement of Tiger's completion sometime tomorrow." There are far better days to make a product announcement, should a company wish to be taken seriously, but it worked for Gmail!
In the past, when Apple has upgraded their OS versions, they have done the following:
(1) customers who purchased a new Mac 30 days (the exchange peroid) before the announcement get a free upgrade CD in the mail (or at an Apple Store perhaps?)
(2) new Macs being built come with the new OS on the hard drive image from the factory.
(3) computers in inventory get their boxes sliced open and a new OS upgrade CD (DVD?) dropped in. This disk requires the install drive to have an OS on it already, so it is not the same as what comes on the boxed OS CD.
I have also read other reports from people who got a free iLife upgrade because of (1) having that CD dropped in their Macs as a separate disk, not the OS and iLife on a single disk.
This may usher in the era of Mac OS missing iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie/iDVD/Garageband on the same CD - thus reinforcing the concept of iLife as an application suite and the OS as a standalone product. Don't look for these new iLife apps on the Tiger install CDs purchased from the store. (But as always, new Macs come with Mac OS and iLife as well as Quicken.)
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
The build numbers don't work that way. Here's a little table with some examples:
MacOS X version Darwin kernel version Build
10.2.0 6.0.0 6Annn
10.2.1 6.1.0
10.3.0 7.0.0 7Annn
10.3.8 7.8.0 7U16 (what I'm running right now)
10.4.0 8.0.0 8A428
The first digit of the build number is always equal to the Darwin kernel's major version number. The next position is a single alpha character which Apple uses to distinguish different lines of development on that major revision of the OS. The first release will always be an 'A'. If the first branch they make is to add drivers for a new computer, that build series will get 'B', the next branch gets 'C' and so forth. The two major kinds of branch that I know about are for updates (10.3.0 -> 10.3.1 etc.) and for new hardware support.
Finally you get to the actual build number, which is simply a boring old decimal number.
So 8A428 actually means it's the first (and probably currently only) branch of 10.4 with 8.x.x series Darwin kernels, and it's at its 428th build.