Uh-oh, now the rumor mill's in trouble. You know how things have been kinda slow lately with the Apple-flavored drama, yeah? And how most rumors sites have been filling space with blow-by-blow accounts of every single new build of Mac OS X 10.3.3? You know what we mean-- "Build 7F32 was recently seeded to developers, with no documented changes since 7F31, which means 10.3.3 will likely be released soon." "Insiders note that build 7F33, which is not a developer seed, has no documented changes from 7F32, but is 2 KB larger, leading to speculation about as-yet-undiscovered changes to the text in Finder Help." "Inside sources report that internal build 7F34 is identical to 7F33 except for a slightly different light bulb icon for the Energy Saver panel of System Preferences." "Build 7F35 restores the Energy Saver icon from build 7F33." And so on.

Well, that particular gravy train o' filler material has just now left the station, because as faithful viewer badtzmat was first to report, 10.3.3 has started popping up in Software Update panels from here to Dedham-- and since Dedham is only about twenty miles south of here, we suspect it may be surfacing in places even farther away. If you're a fan of the chubby updaters, you'll be pleased to note that 10.3.3 weighs in at a zaftig 67 MB, which means there just has to be a ton of enthralling new features and critical bug fixes, right? You got it Sparky; how's default-to-on AppleTalk browsing grab ya? Or improved compatibility with the Honda AH-G10 network card? Or even-- and this is a biggie, so make sure you're sitting down-- the default pulsing button in Open... dialogs now saying "Choose" instead of "Open"? To quote the immortal Fred Sanford, "It's the big one, Elizabeth! I'm comin' to join ya, honey!"

But wait, there's more! For example, 10.3.3 fixes that bug that could grant a user admin-level privileges if an admin logged out before his 5-minute authentication window had closed. It fixes some "unexpectedly quit" issues with Mail and Address Book. It lets Image Capture import files "whose names begin with an underscore character." It "improves Fan Control system function for Power Mac G5 computers" (though we've already heard from one viewer who says it made the fan control worse on his PowerBook G4). All of which makes for a point-release update so frightfully dull we're somewhat baffled as to why anyone might have been so interested in the build-to-build minutiae of this thing in the first place.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, at least from a software release standpoint; this is a point release, after all, and they're not supposed to be exciting. In the best case scenario, you wouldn't notice any difference between the Before and After shots, because with luck you were never suffering from any 10.3.2 bugs in the first place-- or if you were, they were so minor you can't even tell they were fixed. Still, though, from our perspective, we need that drama, and it looks like we're plumb out of luck.

About the most commotion we can hope for is that this 67 MB Sack of Bland™ causes more interesting problems than it fixes. As usual, we're holding off on applying the update until the rest of you lemmings early adopters test the waters, and while we don't wish you any specific harm, we have to say, widespread reports of 10.3.3 causing irretrievable data loss, permanent damage to FireWire circuitry, or chronic cirrhosis of the earlobes would at least give us a scene or two's worth of material. We're just saying, is all.

By the way, the release version is build 7F44. We know you were on the edge of your seat about that.