Well, our guess is that if you're enough of a bleeding-edge early adopter to be running Mac OS X in the first place, you probably already knew about this mere seconds after it became public-- but in any case, version 10.0.4 of that illustrious operating system is finally available for your Software Updating pleasure. So if you're slovenly enough still to be running 10.0.3 (or, worse yet, the desperately antiquated 10.0.1 or 10.0), what in Steve's name are you waiting for? Get on the stick, click that "Search For Updates Now" button, and march bravely into the final third of June. You won't be sorry.

For our part, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff grabbed the update early last night and applied it without incident. As you'd expect with the minuscule increase in its version number, though, 10.0.4 isn't exactly an earth-shattering upgrade; in fact, we honestly didn't notice any change other than the build number in the About box. There's still no DVD playback-- a feature which is now officially late, given that "sometime in the spring" has come and gone. On our Pismo, at least, the brightness and volume keys still don't work reliably, although the Mute button seems to function perfectly (albeit with no visual feedback). Application launches felt a smidge faster, but we had chalked that up to the "optimizing" pre-binding process triggered by each update. To be honest, if we were limited purely to our own observation, we'd be wondering whether Apple had shipped 12 MB of piping hot nothing.

Instead, thanks to a link over at MacFixit, we raided Apple's Tech Info Library and found the complete Mac OS X 10.0.4 Release Notes. Well, whaddaya know? Never let it be said that Apple's engineers aren't a pack of busy little beavers, because 10.0.4 apparently fixes a ton of problems which we seem to have been lucky enough to have completely avoided in the first place. Still, there are no fewer than 38 individual "enhancements" listed, falling under the broad categories of "USB-Related," "Classic-Related," "Internet- and Networking-Related," and "Other." Odds are you'll find at least one improvement that'll slap a grin on your face.

For us, it was #32: "Enhances PowerBook battery power conservation when in sleep mode." We haven't had it installed long enough to put its through its paces, but hopefully that means our Pismo can sleep for an hour without cranking through forty minutes' worth of juice. We always just assumed it was sleep-processing, and that someday we'd wake it up to find it had calculated a three-million-digit prime number or something. In a way we're a little disappointed that we won't be the toast of the International Order of Math Geeks anytime soon, but hey, at least we'll be able to tote our PowerBook across town without it chewing through half a battery charge. As far as consolation prizes go, we'll take it.