Hard Call for Apple, Mac OS X Leopard until October 2007

Well, it looks like there was something to all those rumors about Leopard being delayed after all, even if the supposed reason for it was always wrong, because Apple has just let the bomb drop in a recent 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.

Ouch... This piece of news is not going to go down well. However, all things considered, things must be getting really hectic if Apple had to make this hard choice between being on time with the iPhone or Leopard. On the other hand, this is good news in a way.

Whatever the Top Secret features are, they’re not likely to be minor, since that would simply not justify all the development that is going into Leopard. While not being able to buy the latest cat in June is a bit of a letdown, no doubt the beta version that they will be giving out will make the rounds and have enough previously unreleased features to quell the fires until October.

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