Those of you who plunked down thirty smackers for the privilege of testing the Mac OS X public beta lo those many moons ago may be wondering just how much progress Apple has made on polishing that beta into a 1.0 release. Heck, we know we are-- especially amid the rumors that Apple will formally unleash the beast in all its lickable glory this coming February 24th. After playing with the beta last September, it was clear to us that Apple had a lot of work left to do before Mac OS X was mature enough to leave the kiddie table and come sit with the grown-ups.

Unfortunately, so far Apple hasn't seen fit to bless us public beta testers with a single, solitary update, so we don't have much to go on to gauge the company's progress. While some rumors claim that an update for the beta will ship in three weeks or so at the upcoming Macworld Expo, the heaviest buzz claims that the public beta is just that: THE public beta. Of course, if the February 24th ship date is real, that's pretty much a given; we can't see Apple's engineers killing themselves to issue a public beta patch a month before the Real Thing hits the shelves. Even without a beta update in the works, we bet those people haven't slept since the last time a George Bush was declared President.

That said, apparently the "real" beta testers-- as in, the ones who paid to join Apple's developer program-- did receive one update to the public beta a while back. According to OS X Talk, the release bears the extremely non-public-sounding appellation of "2E14" and includes a list of enhancements and improvements as long as your arm... provided you've got really teeny arms. As a matter of fact, 2E14 appears only to have added two things: multiple language support and zippier performance. Take a second to digest that, and then chew on this: the "zippier performance" bit is debatable. While one user claims a perceivable "15-20%" speed boost, others state that 2E14 adds "no real speedup" at all. One user plainly states that the only difference between the public beta and 2E14 is the addition of multiple language support and the removal of the Charlie's Angels and Vertical Limit QuickTime trailers. Either Apple was trying to save space, or it considers those movies just dandy for the unwashed masses, but beneath the dignity of the average developer (washed or not).

Now, if you find that discouraging, it's worth noting that 2E14 reportedly shipped only a month after the public beta itself-- so it's not exactly a fair yardstick by which to measure Apple's performance. And given how much Steve likes surprises, it's pretty safe to say that he's keeping the Mac OS X cards pretty close to his chest in hopes of wowing the public when 1.0 finally sees the light of day, whether that's on February 24th or not.

Lastly, we should add that some new data has wafted its way into the AtAT studios, and we're now a bit more confident in that whole February 24th release date thingy, despite the suspicious coincidence that it also happens to be Steve's birthday. We can't say why, exactly, but basically one of our trusted sources heard from another trusted source that a third trusted source heard the date straight from one of the mucky-mucks high up at One Infinite Loop (whose name you'd recognize if we were actually allowed to say it). Hey, that's enough corroboration to qualify as stone-cold fact, as far as this show is concerned.