This just in: sources close to the company reveal that Apple has quietly settled out of court with the families of the hundreds of Mac OS X developers who have burst into flame on the job over the course of the past half-decade. Reportedly plaintiffs in the class action suit were prepared to bring in a succession of spontaneous combustion experts to testify that conditions in Apple's operating system development sweatshops were particularly conducive to the whole overly-toasty thing; apparently it's clinically provable that squeezing out four major versions of a single operating system in as many years leads to software engineers catching fire at the brain, wrists, and/or fingers, and being reduced to a small pile of ashes in mere minutes as the burning spreads.

Needless to say, this has all been kept hush-hush for PR reasons, but you have our solemn word that a percentage of the spontaneous combustion report is true. (What? Zero's a percent.) And while you won't see any references to sizzling human flesh in your slightly more mainstream news sources (that's why you love us so), even CNET is talking about the changes that Apple is making as a result of the super-secret class action settlement, albeit in a laughably out-of-context manner: reportedly when discussing Apple's operating system rollouts over the past four or five years, Avie Tevanian was just quoted as saying that "we're slowing that (pace) down a little bit... because that's not a sustainable rate." And so it isn't, at least not without Developer Flambé as a mainstay on the workplace menu.

Not that that's necessarily bad news, mind you. The OS development slowdown will probably strike many Mac users as a blessing instead of a curse, since shelling out an extra $129 each and every year to stay current can't be everybody's idea of a corking good time. And indeed, the necessity of such fast and furious upgrades has toned down a lot; even slavering Apple apologists like ourselves can't deny that Mac OS X 10.0 was woefully incomplete, and it's really only as of Panther that we really get the sense that the operating system feels "done." Now that Mac OS X seems somewhat mature and seasoned with eleven secret herbs and spices, Apple's OS development team can probably ratchet things back a little bit, and not just to avoid doing a short-lived but ultra-realistic impression of Johnny Storm.

Of course, even with the lawsuit, Apple could have kept up its OS development pace if it really wanted to. The settlement provided the final justification, but the real reason for Apple's development slowdown is simple: the company's running out of big cats. When it registered "Tiger" as a trademark, it also grabbed Cougar, Leopard, and Lynx-- and if the company thought that "Ocelot" or "Lion" were at all marketable, you know it would have grabbed those, too. So after Tiger, Apple's only got enough felines to carry it through Mac OS X 10.7, nomenclaturally speaking. If it keeps up its all-out one-big-upgrade-per-year pace, not only will it continue to burn through developers (literally) at an alarming speed, but it'll also be tapped out of cat names by 2008 or so.

Don't worry, though; we're not talking about Apple slowing down to a "Longhorn in 2006, some features in 2009" crawl or anything like that. After Avie announced that Apple wouldn't continue its breakneck one-major-upgrade-per-year pace, he said "But you'll still see us go really fast." Just, you know, not alert-the-next-of-kin fast. And we're cool with that, we guess. If nothing else, it'll probably really help with Apple's insurance premiums.