Apple Preparing to Seed Developer Builds of OS X 10.7.5

os x lion iconWith the public release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion coming next month, some have wondered whether the current OS X 10.7.4 will be the final maintenance update for OS X Lion. OS X 10.7.4 was released to the public in early May, and the timeline would be tight for releasing another update prior to the debut of Mountain Lion.

AppleInsider now reports that Apple is preparing to begin seeding builds of a new OS X 10.7.5 to developers in the coming days. No details on the upcoming release have yet been revealed, as the first sign of impending developer builds typically comes from Apple's developer programs simply posting new discussion forums related to the releases.

The new Retina MacBook Pro is currently shipping with a special build of OS X 10.7.4 to include Retina-capable versions of core OS X apps, although Retina capabilities have been showing with increasing visibility throughout the various versions of OS X Lion and now developer builds of OS X Mountain Lion. It is unknown whether these new machines will receive a special build of OS X 10.7.5 or if Apple will incorporate the new Retina display capabilities into a single OS X 10.7.5 build available for all Macs even if they do not support ultra-high resolutions.

A timetable for a public release of OS X 10.7.5 is also currently unknown, including whether it will appear before or after OS X Mountain Lion is released to the public. Apple has on occasion released full maintenance updates after the launch of a successor operating system, most recently with Mac OS X 10.4.11 arriving nearly three weeks after the debut of Mac OS X Leopard, but the company typically limits its older operating systems to security fixes once their successors have launched.

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Top Rated Comments

MacOG728893 Avatar
176 months ago
Does this get rid of Mission Control comments in 3,2,1...
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
CIA Avatar
176 months ago
Hopefully OS level integrated USB 3 support so us MacPro users can finally buy cheap plug and play USB3 PCIe cards without having to deal with drivers, updating drivers, troubleshooting drivers... etc.

Oh and TRIM support for 3rd party SSD's without jumping though hoops would be nice also.
Score: 3 Votes (Like | Disagree)
daneoni Avatar
176 months ago


- A much needed revamped Finder (HFS+ is wearing very thing, I recall Leopard beta's with ZFS+, shame SunSystems went down and IP et al is keeping such a needed system out of OS X)

- OpenGL Core support (4+ is lagging and needed)

- Lagging support for the professional industry that carried Apple through its rough times and gave them the R&D to venture into Finger-works and multi-touch iOS devices

- Multi-display support


Well we are in agreement on these points. For sure.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jlnr Avatar
176 months ago
I don't understand why Apple has excluded machines from upgrading to 10.8 at all. It seems to be a step up from 10.7 for absolutely everybody, unlike 10.7, which has removed some 10.6 features like iSync, Rosetta, server stuff.

Is there *anything* missing in 10.8 that 10.7 can do? Support for old-style FileVault maybe? Or is there anything in 10.8 that really requires more horsepower than 10.7? Even all the HiDPI stuff has been crammed into 10.7 by now.

I wish they'd just give everyone 10.8 so developers would only have to deal with 10.8 and maybe 10.6, but not 10.7.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
commander.data Avatar
176 months ago
It makes sense to release a final 10.7.5 in order to roll the new WWDC 2012 Macs into mainline Lion. It'll greatly simplify future security updates, iTunes updates, Java updates, etc. by not having to worry about a bunch of custom 10.7.4 builds.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)
daneoni Avatar
176 months ago
Would there be any reason someone stays of from Mountain Lion and keep Lion?

I get people staying in Snow Leopard. But from Lion, I think things can only get better. Truly, I like the design and new features of Lion, but so far it has been far from being a stable release.
There's no built in RSS support in Mountain Lion. Also some systems simply can't run it. So yea there are reasons.

why don't they just call Mountain Lion 10.7.6 instead?
Because its not a point update.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)