Cupertino (CA) - Apple has begun to more aggressively update its Mac OS X operating system and is now patching the operating system with regular minor security updates and incremental updates pretty much once a month. The fifth update for Leopard was handed to developers last week and will be making its way as Mac OS X 10.5.5 to end-users soon.

Developers who downloaded the 10.5.5 build said that the software addresses more than eighty bugs reported in 10.5.4, such as unexpected crashes in the Dashboard application and a number of issues found in iCal and iChat. The beta update build also patches bugs in system core services and applications such as Finder, Time Machine, Networking, Airport, FileSync and text services.

Apple warns developers that beta build should not be used with Macs that are based on integrated graphics chips due to a potential bug in the software’s graphics library that may be addressed in subsequent betas. "Do not install on the following machines: MacBook Air, MacBook, Mac Mini, iMac (with Intel integrated graphics)," Apple wrote in the software’s release notes.

Apple released two updates for Mac OS X in the past two months in this would be the third update within three months. While we don’t know whether Apple will continue to roll out updates on a monthly basis, we can’t help but notice some similarity with Microsoft’s patch pattern: Windows is patched on a regular schedule once a month.

But we do know that these patches will, sooner or later, fuel much more critical discussions about Mac OS X and its quality. "More than eighty bugs" sounds quite substantial to us and should give Microsoft and Windows Vista users some firepower against Apple’s operating system.