Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is not even three months old and it appears that the wizards at 1 Infinite Loop are already hard at work on 10.7. Evidence has surfaced that Apple is hard at work on the next version of OS X, based on an entry posted earlier today in a database of changes to the open source "launchd" framework.
That framework oversees booting of Mac OS X and administers processes running on the system. More telling is an error message instance which contains the text string "11A47" which appears to be a reference to the Mac OS X build number in use.
11A47: SecurityAgent no longer visible via Accessibility
It is established that Apple’s build numbering scheme employs a numerical prefix indicating major release, then a letter code indicating the minor release and a finally a numerical suffix indicating iterations throughout development.
Taking the recently release Mac OS X Snow Leopard as an example, when released it had Build 10A432. A subsequent update (10.6.1) was designated Build 10B504 and the most recent update (10.6.2) was assigned Build 10C540. Prior to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 (simply Leopard) had a build number of 9A571 at launch.
With this scheme, the "11A47" string in the launchd change database would appear to refer to the initial version of Mac OS X 10.7. That the iteration number is merely 47 indicates that it is still early in the development effort. It does indicate, however, that Apple has been hard at work on this version of OS X for the past month at least.
This actually shouldn’t be that much of a surprise, and should be consider par for the course for Apple. Operating Systems require an inordinate amount of time to refine and polish. Many are speculating that 10.7 will usher profound changes in user experience when released, unlike 10.6 Snow Leopard which primarily dealt with behind-the-scenes improvement.
