Two days! Can you believe it? In less than forty-eight hours, the first public version of Mac OS X will burst forth from Steve Jobs's head, fully-armored and ready for abuse by legions of Mac geeks the world over. And we know this to be true, because this is the first time ever that Apple's committed to a real, solid, honest-to-goodness release date for the operating system: September 13th, a specific square on the calendar, as opposed to those wonderfully vague "this summer" or "early next year" generalities that have been bandied about in the past. Apple has finally pinpointed the release of the Mac OS X public beta to a single twenty-four hour chunk of time, and that chunk is fast approaching.

Let's see, here... Steve's Apple Expo keynote is scheduled to start at 10 AM Paris time. That's what-- six hours ahead of our own Eastern Daylight Time? So at about four o' clock on Wednesday morning, Apple's iCEO will stroll out on stage and start distorting reality in the time-honored tradition-- and at some point between, say, 4 and 6 AM EDT, he'll announce the immediate availability of the Mac OS X public beta. The sky will open up, choirs of heavenly angels will sing, and a new era of cosmic peace and enlightenment will envelop the earth. And then it'll be a mere four to six weeks before you receive your copy. (Cue needle-dragged-across-record sound effect here.)

Okay, okay... probably not four to six weeks. But if Apple goes the snail-mail-only distro route, you've got to figure that it'll be at least a few days from the time you place your order to the time a CD shows up in your mailbox. So much for "immediate availability." We here at AtAT have been pretty publicly skeptical that Apple would release the beta as a free download, for several reasons. For one thing, as far as we've heard, every developer release of the OS to date has shipped on a bootable CD-ROM, and the installation process reportedly does some pretty hairy things with Open Firmware settings and multiple restarts. If one assumes that the public beta requires a similarly hairy installation procedure, then we doubt Apple would post a CD-ROM image that requires a user to own a CD-R drive just to get the download into an installable state.

Then there's the issue of bandwidth. Imagine the sound of a million mouse buttons clicking in unison. Assuming that the Mac OS X public beta is several hundred megabytes in size, and that every Mac user with a fast connection would be trying to download that puppy mere milliseconds after it gets posted, we envision the Internet equivalent of flushing every toilet in Grand Central Station at the same time. We've never actually seen a router explode (a few probably started smoldering when Victoria's Secret tried that lingerie show webcast), but we bet it's pretty darn cool.

Anyway, we hope we're wrong about this, because you're not the only ones who'd love to be able to download the beta on Wednesday morning. There's at least one indication that a free download is in the cards: Mac OS Rumors hints that the beta "will not require the traditional CD-boot installation necessary for all previous versions of OS X," and thus Apple "intends to offer a downloadable installer." We're keeping our fingers crossed; we figure that if anyone can make it happen, Apple can. Browsers at the ready!