Apple delayed release of Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' until October

Citing the demands of getting the iPhone ready for its late June release, Apple issued a statement delaying the release of Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' from spring until October. Here is Apple's 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."

As much as we would like to have Leopard soon, we would much prefer to have the iPhone soonest so we completely agree with Apple's priorities. Still, the announcement comes as a surprise given that Apple openly denied a rumored delay as recently as late March and, as we noted, released Boot Camp 1.2 beta that is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista at the end of March. Since Boot Camp is set to expire in September, perhaps it will be extended at least until Leopard arrives in October because its expiration will cause problems as we noted on Wednesday. [Bill Fox]