No Leopard until October

[Satcomer]

Apple delays Leopard until October because of iPhone

[Terminator182]

Wow. Not too happy about that, especially since I was getting a new iMac this June with Leopard. Hopefully this move doesn't allow any unfortunate consequences to follow. Six more months wait. Dang.

[ScottW]

Oh no! Apple is taking on so many projects, it is starting to become Microsoftish. Ugh, I get shivers up my spine.

[fryke]

Me too. :/ Although I agree they should take their time to finish it. I just hope it won't erase firewire harddrives when it's released (as did Panther).

[Mikuro]

.....

Well that's a bummer. I just hope Leopard doesn't become the next Longhorn. 2.5 years is already an eon in Mac time.

The fact that Apple diverted development resources away from OS X brings back that sneaky feeling that the Mac OS is falling by the wayside. Come to think of it, this should've been on my list of signs of doom back in January.

[bbloke]

Hmm, a bit of a shame, although I too would rather they took their time and had a polished product at the end of it. I'm not keen on the increasing trend for the public being the ones to serve as quality assurance for software!

It also bothers me a bit that resources have been diverted away from the Mac and to the iPhone. It raises old issues/fears about Apple's priorities, whether or not there is actually much to worry about.

From Satcomer's link:

...As a result, Apple won’t release Leopard at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, as it had first planned.

“While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October...

Does this mean there are still quite a few problems with Leopard, and perhaps development did not go as well as planned? Or perhaps, taking it at face value, resources were just diverted during Leopard's development, delaying it?

[ScottW]

Well, it is probably true, they diverted resource for the iPhone. That means that Apple decided it was better the delay Mac OS X, than to delay the iPhone. That is a sign that Apple is gambling that the iPhone will be more profitable than releasing OS X 10.5.

[salival]

I rather they take their time and do it right. Tiger works great and Adobe is about to release CS3 for intel Macs, so things are good.


sal