14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has warmed up their photocopiers for Mac OS X Leopard and is copying Windows Vista. The Cupertino-based company has traded-off Leopard for the iPhone, and announced last week that Mac OS X 10.5 has slipped all the way into October 2007.
Apple revealed that it did not have the necessary resources to complete two projects simultaneously. As such, the Mac OS X team was left without some of its key software engineers, as they moved to work on the iPhone.
"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(R) X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned," informed a press release from Apple that lacks sincerity over the very poor condition which Leopard build 9A410 - made available the past week - was in.
There is one problem with this excuse though, namely the fact that Microsoft has already used it. That's right, Apple has started copying Microsoft, and Windows Vista. I don't know if many of you remember, but back in the first half of 2004, Microsoft was laboring to get two products ready: Windows XP Service Pack 2 and the beta for Longhorn, which ended up as Windows Vista. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's former Co-President, Platforms & Services Division stated in 2004 that Longhorn beta was postponed due to the fact that developers had to focus on Windows XP SP2.
Apple planned to release Leopard at the beginning of June. That's under two months. Some users have commented that the disastrous quality of Leopard version 9A410 is due to the fact that the build is an alpha version. It is not. It is as close to finish as it gets, and as a result, Apple has chosen the only way out, move the release date further back since the quality suffers to such a degree.
"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," Apple added.