Apple Delays OSX Leopard

Apple has issued a statement saying that Leopard will now be delayed until October this year due to developers being "borrowed" from the OS X team for the development of the iPhone.

Sneaky

Apple announced the news on their web site yesterday but don't provide a link for the statement, which explains why I didn't catch it on their RSS feeds.

At first I thought this was a bit sneaky, but you can understand they're probably embarrassed about the news, but then - it's sneaky, in a kind of cheeky way for a small time company to slip the news in. It's not really on that a big time company like Apple to sneak it in.

Time to swallow some pride

I was looking forward to Leopard's release, as were many of my mac buddies. I've been involved in conversations suggesting delaying the purchasing of hardware for the June release of OS X.

It's always been fun to rub it in to the Windows users over the constant stream of late Microsoft releases.

This time though: Vista delivered ~~on time~~ this year while Apple was poking fun.

I guess it was only a matter of time until something slipped.

iPhone or Leopard?

Apple's move away from 'Apple Computer' has had some criticising their focus, and this announcement only drawing weight to their concerns.

Apple is a great company, and for them to expand sensibly in to other sectors, dropping 'Computer' from their name makes sense and clearly doesn't affect their focus.

If the iPhone delivers what it promises, it will change the way people (want to) use their phones.

So, on one hand, as a mac fanboy, I'm pretty miffed that Leopard will be delayed (and by default I assume iLife will also be delayed). On the other hand, as an individual that works with deadline and software (though nowhere near as big) - I think Apple are making the right move to delay Leopard.

Europe gets a double?

Does this mean that since the iPhone is to ship on time, and the iPhone in Europe was due to ship around Q4, we'll have Leopard and the iPhone at the same time? Damn, I'm going to have to take out a loan!

I'll take late over crap any day

So long as they don't keep slipping the shipping date, and they're still dedicated to releasing a quality stable product, I'm happy to wait, and I think the mac community will agree. It's the reason I use a Mac over a PC - I prefer to know it's going to work.