So now that Mac OS X 10.1 is here (sort of), all those software engineers that Apple has kept chained to their Macs and artificially awake through the use of Clockwork Orange-style eyelid-clips and highly illegal controlled substances can finally collapse in a quivering gelatinous mass and get a little rest, right? Wrong. You may indeed have gotten the impression from Uncle Steve's last Expo demo that this latest version of Apple's next-generation operating system is the absolute pinnacle of OS development and, as such, represents utter perfection and the endpoint of operating system evolution; if so, prepare yourself for a shock. There's a slight chance that Steve may have been engaging in a practice known as "marketing." If that's the case, then most likely 10.1 isn't perfect, and there's still room for improvement. Which means, of course, the shackles stay on and it's time to break out the horse amphetamines.

Indeed, faithful viewer CodeBitch notes that the Naked Mole Rat has just emerged from his latest hibernation to dish the dirt on Mac OS X's future in the post-10.1 era. We've already heard tell that Apple is whipping the code slaves to carve out yet another chunkstyle upgrade known as 10.2, code-named "Jaguar." But what of the more annoying and urgent holes still rattling around in 10.1? Well, according to His Ratness, Apple intends to address the "niggling performance and stability issues held over from Puma" by issuing "three interim updates" to 10.1 (just as 10.0 spawned 10.0.1, 10.0.2, and 10.0.4 prior to 10.1's release) before Jaguar sees the light of day at the next Macworld Expo in January-- if all goes according to plan.

The tricky bit (other than squeezing another few man-hours out of a development staff that hasn't slept since 1996) is that Apple obviously wants to prioritize appropriately, so that the most annoying and frequently-occurring bugs from a customer perspective get fixed in the earliest update. But work on 10.1.1 is already underway, and seeing as the Mac community at large won't even be able to get its hands on 10.1 until this Saturday, how are Apple's code slaves already supposed to know which bugs users are tripping across most often?

Well, according to the Rat, even as Apple seethes over less-than-legal leaks of its developmental OS builds to all the eyepatch-sporting, pegleg-hobbling, parrot-loving, hook-for-a-hand WAR3Z enthusiasts out there, some good does in fact come of rampant prerelease piracy: evidently Apple is sifting through feedback posted to the 'net by software pirates in order to get a jump on 10.1.1 and beyond. Sounds like maybe Steve should be flying the Jolly Roger once again.