Mac OS X 10.8 Confirmed - Apple's Next Big Cat

Apple has begun testing its next major version of the Mac operating system, Mac OS X 10.8, of which we currently don’t know anything in terms of features. That includes the name too.

People with a keen eye for web visits from Cupertino, California have discovered that Apple is accelerating the development of Macintosh | Intel 10.8.

Specifically, the listings showed the following software being tested: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8) AppleWebKit/535.6.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.2 Safari/535.6.2.

MacRumors admits that it would be fairly easy to falsify these records, though doing so would only spell a short-term win.

Besides, similar activity has been recorded in past years, like, for example, with OS X 10.7 Lion.

The blog claims to have been able to confirm that the OS X 10.8 requests originated from Apple, Inc. IP addresses and surrounding areas, while the overall clustering is consistent with limited internal testing, according to the report.

The pattern is almost identical to the one observed in October 2009, when Apple kicked off Lion development, or at least went online with Mac OS X 10.7.

While the features in OS X 10.8 are anybody’s guess, the name should be a tad more predictable.

It is fair to assume that Apple will want to continue the tradition of naming major OS X iterations after big cats, the most recent of which were Tiger (OS X 10.4), Leopard (OS X 10.5), Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6), and Lion (OS X 10.7), the latter being the current-selling version of the operating system.

In this respect, a more advanced OS X would be named after an even more elusive feline, though it is hard to pinpoint which one. White Tiger would certainly be an attractive name and marketing icon, don't you think?

Update: our own tests show that OS X 10.8 web access actually kicked off sometime in July, not August. See our graph below (click to enlarge).

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