Thursday, April 12, 2007

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard delayed until October

Well, there goes that prediction. Apple has delayed the 10.5 Leopard release until the fall. Apple states in their Hot News section that they have stolen resources from Leopard development and put them into development of the iPhone's OS.
Apple Statement
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. 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. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]
That's pretty disappointing, especially since at least one report claimed Apple reiterated privately they'd ship the OS this quarter. One might think that Apple's resources are more limited than many might have expected, if the development of a single piece of consumer electronics can hold up something as important as Leopard. We can be quite sure the developers attending WWDC this year won't be happy about this.

I wonder if the launch of the next version of iLife has also been delayed. The good news though is that the next iMac won't held up by Leopard, so we can reasonably expect it sooner rather than later, with "sooner" possibly meaning next month.

AAPL was down $1.75 (1.9%) to $90.44 in after hours trading.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since Apple is delaying 10.5 so long they better incorporate full support for a better integrated Boot Camp like Parallels Desktop. I would want to be able to run Mac OSX and Windows side by side with drag and drop abilities like you can using Parallels. Having to use one OS, reboot use another and then reboot again is so early 1990's.

Anonymous said...

Rather that an issue with resources per sey, I think is speaks volumes on how IMPORTANT the Apple Phone really is. For that matter any product release thats NOT a computer. Remember its not Apple Computer anymore its Apple Inc. I wonder if the name will ever morph into Apple Media Inc. Hmmmm....

Anonymous said...

I really like the iPhone and its touch screen, but it still isn't 3G. 3G technology has been out in Europe for a while now and this is much faster with a higher bandwidth giving you the ability to send video. I would want to see an iPhone with a built in 30fps iSight so that you can video chat live with another iPhone user. This 1 ability would make everyone go out and buy one.

Anonymous said...

I won't buy an iPhone until it is 3G. When they incorporate 3G technology into the phone they will have the ability to include an iSight into the camera as well and your connection speed will be fast enough to video phone anyone else with a 3G iPhone as well.

It seems that phone technology is always coming out in Europe 3-4 years before it comes out in the US. I was just talking to someone the other day who lived in Europe. He told me that he had a cell phone he bought there and is was SO fast, booted up immaturely but he accidentally broke it on the street. When buying a new one here in the US he said that for the same price you get a cheap phone that loads slowly and has a slow Internet connection while you could get a "free" phone in Europe which is faster than many you have to pay for in the US.

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