It’s been nearly three weeks since Apple deemed their latest version of OS X to be ready for a prime time release on the Mac App Store, a decision that resulted in over three million Mac owners purchasing and downloading the cutting-edge operating system within the first twenty-four hours. The early indications seem to show that users were generally happy with what Mountain Lion brought to their Mac experience, but a few users have been reporting a detrimental effect on internal MacBook batteries.
As part of their ongoing dedication to providing first class hardware and software to end-users, Apple has started the update process by pushing out an initial 10.8.1 beta seed to registered developers of the Mac OS X developer program. We had previously been made aware that members of the AppleSeed program had started to see notifications of the 10.8.1 update in their inboxes with the next natural step in the process being to allow those who actively produce software for the operating system to test it out.
The update is showing for developers via the Mac Dev Center website, and has been given the official 12B13 build number. As is always the case when initial beta versions of software are pushed out by the Cupertino giants, it is accompanied by a pretty large set of notes and legal disclaimers. As part of the release documentation, Apple is declaring that they are aware of no issues whatsoever in the 12B13 build, but have specifically requested that those testing the software focus their attentions to specific key areas of interest.
Although the company is publicly stating that the build contains no known issues, or issues that are large enough to make a point of, they have asked developers to test out things like Exchange Mail, PAC Proxies in Safari, USB connections and the performance of Audio when connected via Thunderbolt. Developers can expect to download a DMG file that is just over 36MB in size on their Mac, and Apple is stressing that the system cannot be reverted back to OS X 10.8.0 after the install, so they should be installing on a test Mac which they are prepared to wipe if anything goes drastically wrong.
The release of 10.8.1, albeit an initial development beta seed, will certainly bring some hope to those users who have been experiencing some issues with Mountain Lion. We will sit back and wait to see if Apple has fixed the battery drain issue on MacBook machines.
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