Apple has just released a statement today postponing the planned “spring” release of Leopard until October. Apple blames the engineering drain the iPhone project has caused for them internally. Many developers with early access to Leopard are not surprised by this announcement, as the recent seeds have still looked far from ready for production, but it is an unusual move by a company that nearly always makes its stated due dates.
From the release:
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.
Some questions to ponder...
1. How big is the sh*t-eating grin on the lips of Bill Gates, and does every Windows fan in the world know the definition of Schadenfreude?
2. "Cupertino has a cat, too. But it fell asleep."
3. Apple releases MacOS point updates about every 3-4 months. The last update was 10.4.9...does this mean there will be a 10.4.10?
4. First Apple dropped "Computer" from its name, now they have stated that working on a phone is more important then working on the operating system that powers their personal computers. Is this another sign that MacOS hardware and software is continuing to fade in importance at Apple?
5. Will developers finally really see "secret features" in June?
6. Does Steve Jobs wish he really had a "time machine?"
7. As far as I can remember, this is the first time since the mid 1990s - and the first time ever since Steve Jobs came back to Apple - that Apple has publicly missed an announced ship date of the MacOS.
Ah well. Better late than buggy like Tiger.
We survived the nearly decade-long wait for a decent successor to System 7, as Copeland became Rhapsody became Mac OS X. So a couple more months isn't going to bother anyone. It's not like people are voicing displeasure with Tiger, after all.
I am pretty happy with 10.4.9 right now. Apple likes to put out a good product, so the delay is probably a good thing. Who really needs 10.5 now anyway besides the geek squad?
This statement is no less than shocking. It is proof that other things have taken priority over the Mac at Apple.
On the other hand, Apple can now make the WWDC the Leopard Party it deserves to be with finally uncovering the whole story while at the same time giving developers until October to make the necessary adjustments.
Oliver said, "This statement is no less than shocking. It is proof that other things have taken priority over the Mac at Apple."
That is one of the first things that I thought and it bothers me a great deal.
The other thing that really bothers me about this is that I'm pretty sure they have also been working on new versions of iWork and iLife and that they are tied to Leopard.
This isn't shocking. The iPhone, Apple TV, and iPod are part of the whole -- a seamless extension of your Mac. Clearly they understand how important Mac is -- but these other products are important too. So what if Apple needs a little more time to get several blockbuster products right?
I'm happy with my PowerMac G5, MacBook Core 2 Duo, Airport Extreme N, and Apple TV. I'll buy the iPhone as soon as my contract is up, the 10.5/iWork/iLife family licenses as soon as they're available, and I might even upgrade my son's iMac this year.
Mac is alive and well.
Bad hype, but I'm quite happy with my ol' cat tiger ;-)
Couple of thoughts occur to me:
1) Maybe the big beta-testers (Adobe, Microsoft, Quark) and a vocal majority of the smaller but still important testers have put their collective feet down, and asked for an extended proper 'final-beta' period with a feature-complete version of the software?
2) Effectively, 10.5.0 is now more likely to be a 10.5.2-equivalent, based roughly on previous timelines, and so I'm going to be a lot happier adopting Leopard at release.
3) I'm also going to be happier that the European release of the iPhone is ready as well; perhaps the delay in Leopard is to guarantee that a pan-European supplier like Orange, T-mobile, or Vodafone is getting a working 3G phone ahead of the Christmas market?
4) Please can we go to LeopardSecretFeaturesWorld....
Given the actual state of Leopard I would believe they moved devs FROM iPhone to OSX. There's no way they can have Leopard in a decent shape by June, and I'm not talking about those "secret features", whatever they are.
Leopard has to be the most amazing 64bit, ZFS based, GPGPU exploiting, tactile UI based, BUG FREE OS ever conceived by human kind or the only secret feature will be 'How to loose the computer market in a One Huge Flop'.
Come on Dave. How can you say its not shocking news? A delivery date has been missed by 4 months on a OS that has already been out for a relatively long time. The so called Leopard Day in June now looks more like being another iPhone launch day. Leopard so far has not looked anything special at all and thats because all effort is going into the iPhone.
A journo wrote an erticle about a year ago saying that he/she would not be suprised if Apple actually dropped OS X completely over the next 5 years as their major income streams are coming in via the iPod. He/she also stated that if the rumoured phone was indeed a phone/personal portable media hub then things would probably get even worse. I will be honest with you ... I think the iPhone will make an incredible amount of money for Apple ... but I believe that this will end up being a bad thing. As daft as it sounds, I also now think that in 5 years time there is every chance that Apple will be out of the OS market totally. I could even be more cynical in saying that the intel switch was in preparation for this possible future scenario. Whats the point in developing software that generates only 10% of your profit?
Pedro might be right.
A while ago there was a rumour, amid loud guffaws and some snarling, that Leopard would be delayed until October because Apple wanted to better support Vista.
No word about that on any Mac sites. Collective amnesia?
You mean the Vista support that came out when Bootcamp 1.2 was released less than a week after said rumor surfaced?
Pedro,
Journalists say the darndest things ;)
You simply don't understand Apple if you think they could drop OS X. Apple is about quality that starts at the processor and ends with you. Everything in between is carefully designed to give you the best computing and consumer product experience. There would be no way to deliver that experience on any other OS.
Mac and OS X are an essential part of the Apple ecosystem.
Dave
In a perfect geeky world yeah .... but I get the feeling that the almighty dollar now rules the big A with a vengeance. Did anybody else notice that Aplle today introduced another Windows compatible product? My guess is that after the iPhone's synchronisation software (which obviously will have around a 95% Windows base ... like the ipod) the first app to go Windows will be Aperture. i say this because the new FC Server looks like it utilises quite a bit from Aperture. If thsi happens then, regardless of what Apple say, OS X is on the way out. The geeks in us all love OS X and its software but the bottom line is that at end the of the day Apple is a fundamentally a hardware company and its software profits are dwarfed by the ipod success, which, lefte be honest, only went stellar when it went Windows. Its sad I know.
I hope you are right Dave but I have a bad feeling about the whole affair.
The first fost have really missed the mark. Apple is awsome and are doing a great job. Steave is just making sure that the OS is 100% unlike Gates