Mac OS 10.8 users already doing external testing

9to5 Staff | Oct 31 2011 - 12:13 am PT

Mac OS 10.8 testers both inside Apple’s HQ and in the surrounding area of Silicon Valley have been spotted in Web Logs by MacRumors. Indeed, looking at our own logs (above), 10.8 users have been hitting our servers since mid-August, though only in numbers that probably could have been faked.

More recently, however, 10.8 testing has grown more abundant, with testers hitting our site every day including on weekends from non-Apple IP addresses throughout October.

Similar patterns emerged in testing OS 10.7 which leads us to conclude that this is still very early testing and it is likely more than a year before we’ll see even public betas of the OS.

Still, very nice to see Apple’s already working on the next big cat.