I had been wondering what Apple would do with the predicament they put themselves in by releasing OS X 10.4.9 in March and then pushing the release of OS X 10.5 “Leopard” until October. I knew they couldn’t go that long without any updates, but their build naming scheme was seemingly at the limits. Now we have the answer; Apple is about to seed an early version of OS X 10.4.10.

While I had been thinking it would be something like 10.4.9.1 or 10.4.9a, a commenter on my post correctly said that it would be 10.4.10 even though to me this seems to be the same thing as 10.4.1 (which coincidentally was released two years ago yesterday).

Good to see that Apple is still focused on fixing issues with OS X 10.4 even though they no doubt are in full swing to finish 10.5 in time to show some new things at WWDC next month. They probably even have their OS X team members back now who were pulled to work on iPhone (the officially stated reason for the OS X 10.5 delay) as the iPhone was just cleared by the FCC today, so it’s good to launch in a few short weeks.

[UPDATE 5/18]: As many Digg commentors have pointed out, I don’t know my software numbering conventions. Still, it would seem to me that I wouldn’t be the only one confused by this. After all, Apple has stopped at 10.x.9 with all other versions of OS X, and they clearly planned on doing that with 10.4 as well – it’s only because 10.5 was pushed back that they’ve had to go ahead with this 10.4.10.

[UPDATE 2]: I’d also like to point out that ArsTechnica says basically the exact same thing.

“Apple has been pretty strict on version numbering and likes a .0 version to come after a .9. Apple has historically been rather phobic of .10.”

Could they be reading my blog as well?…