OS X Mavericks (named after a surfing hot spot in California) was announced recently, and it contains a ton of new features for Mac users to pore over and learn anew. While not as incredible an overhaul as the concurrent update to iOS 7, Mavericks still contains some fairly helpful features and additions to make it worth some poking around, even in the beta.

Speaking of the beta, remember that any of the stuff we talk about below may only exist in the beta, or in some other form, so enjoy playing around with these things, but don’t worry when things are different when Mavericks releases for real in the Fall.

That said, let’s take a look at five new, hidden, and above all, interesting, features of the latest beta for OS X: Mavericks.

Remember PostSecret? That was an app based on the PostSecret website, where people were encouraged to share secrets anonymously, with pictures and words. The app got discontinued due to potential abuses; the founder, Frank Warren, pulled it from the App Store when he thought it had gone too far.

Whisper, then, uses the same idea: allow people to post pictures with meme-like text over the top to anonymously share secret things they can’t get out there on regular social networking sites. What Whisper does differently, though, is to put the private messaging behind a paywall. You’ll need to pony up six bucks a month to be able to message users of the service privately.

AllThingsD says that Apple will announced the next iPhone on October 4th, next Thursday, at a small venue at its own Cupertino HQ. Since All Things D’s “source” is almost definitely Apple itself, that date and venue seems pretty solid.

It’s about the only report about the next iPhone that feels solid. What else do we know for sure about the next iPhone? Pretty much bupkis for sure. Apple has gone to unprecedented and incredible lengths to keep the exact details of the next iPhone secret. It’s the first time Apple journalists have truly felt left in the dark for a long time.

After news broke yesterday that Apple had, for the second time in two years, lost an iPhone prototype at a San Francisco bar, the general reaction was one of incredulity. How could Cupertino carelessly misplace their prized corporate secrets twice in a row?

It happens more than you might think. In fact, we’ve got the exclusive scoop on how one guy walked out of his local Apple Store recently with something unique… a complete Time Machine backup of the Apple Store’s internal file server, filed with top secret and confidential Apple Store documents.

Even weirder? Apple just gave it to him.

Here’s a full transcript of my interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.

It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).