Is The Leopard Delay a Big Deal?

Now that the initial shock of Apple's postponing of the Leopard release date is over, the waters have calmed once again. As big as the waves the announcement made were, they simply did not last.

While Leopard does offer significant improvements over Tiger, in terms of 64-bit compatibility and things like resolution independence, the bulk of the know features are simply not major enough by themselves to make a difference. Sure, Leopard will offer a host of nifty new features, but the core functionality of them can already be had today through third party applications. Nothing of what was previewed so far was big enough to make users angry that they could not get their hands on it earlier.

Furthermore, unlike the generation gap between Vista and XP, Tiger is still an up-to-date, capable operating system. In fact, many argue that Tiger is actually on par with Vista, so there is no feeling of being stuck in the Stone Age. From this point of view, Apple's policy for secrecy worked well for them. Undoubtedly, those Top Secret features will have a bigger impact than the new templates in Mail and the animated background in iChat, however, since they were not actually made public, nobody can actually miss not having them. By the time we get a closer look at these top secret features At the WWDC, the release date will no longer be so far out.

If anything, the only truly significant problem for Apple that arises from the Leopard delay is missing out on the educational market, where Leopard could have conceivably helped sell some more machines. On the other hand, this could easily be avoided by offering a free upgrade deal on any educational purchases for current computers.