According to the latest reports on the availability date of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple has postponed its operating system because of Windows Vista. Initially, I read this with a smile in the corner of my mouth, but it also got me thinking. Apple has not as yet announced an official shipping date for Mac OS X Leopard. Apple did point to Spring 2007 as the general period in which the operating system will be made available for the general public, but other than this, it failed to narrow down the forecasted date.

In this context, speculation has proposed mid-March and April as possible months for the launch of Leopard. With March out of the question, rumors have focused on April. But only for a brief time as new surfaced reports claim that Mac OS X Leopard will be delivered all the way in October 2007 in order to support Windows Vista. The new suppositions present the scenario in which Apple will make Boot Camp software an integer part of Leopard.

Apple's Boot Camp is designed to support Windows on Intel-based Macs. Currently, via Boot Camp Mac, users are only able to run Windows XP on their systems, support for Windows Vista is yet to be added and apparently this issue has generated the push back of Leopard's release date until October.

If these reports turn out to be true, Apple will not have been the first developer to blame delayed software products on Microsoft's operating system, because of issues related to Vista support and compatibility. Additional reports claim that Leopard is in very poor shape, so poor in fact that it is not, at this stage anything more than a beta built, and nowhere near the final product. In this regard, Apple would simply make Windows Vista a convenient scapegoat for the problems that plague Leopard and the slow pace at which it manages to address them.

An Apple representative addressing the matter at hand revealed that the Cupertino company refuses to comment on speculations and that Leopard is still on track for availability in Spring 2007.