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Apple Delays Leopard to October
SuperMog2002 writes "Apple Insider has the sad news that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed until October. Apparantly software engineers and QA had to be reassigned to the iPhone in order to get it out on time, costing Leopard its release at WWDC. For now the original press release from Apple can be found on the 'Hot News' part of their site, though Apple did not provide a permanent link to the story. 'While Leopard's features will be complete by June, the Cupertino-based company said it cannot deliver the quality release expected by its customers within that time. Apple now plans to show its 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 the software in October.'"
Leopard's delay isn't that big a deal for most of Apple's regular users. Tiger works well enough. There isn't all that much in Leopard that I'm really looking forward to having.
I can wait comfortably for another quarter if it means that Leopard will be released as a better operating system than was Tiger when it was released initially.
The bigger concern would seem to me to be the developers who've pegged their next release on feature that are Leopard only. They're going to lose out on four months worth of income. Hopefully the new features in Leopard, especially the under-the-hood suff makes developing so much easier that it's going to be worth it for them.
In the meantime, I'll download a nightly of webkit (safari is the only real annoyance I have on my Mac) and get on with my work.
In illa quae ultra sunt
Anyone following news of recent developer builds of Leopard could have predicted that it wasn't near being ready. No sign of the announced "top secret" features, and mile-long bug lists. Good that they're willing to take the PR hit (oops! they jabbed Microsoft about delaying Vista, didn't they?) instead of release a pile of crap in June.
Interesting that they had to pull engineers off OS X to the iPhone. Most likely, they needed to get the iPhone done in time to meet contractual requirements with Cingular, and there wasn't enough time to hire new staff and train them. It can take months to get even the brightest new hires up to speed and productive, so this is understandable. Especially when training new hires means some of your existing staff is dedicated to that instead of real work. So, in keeping with the dropping of "Computer" from their name, Apple just put the computer stuff on the backburner and took the quick route of using existing, knowledgeable engineers.
Too bad they didn't do better long range forecasting for staffing needs a year or two ago...
Wonder what this'll do to Mac sales, as many people were waiting for a Leopard release before buying? Will people still wait 6 more months, or will they buy now? Will they go PC to spite Apple for the delay?
They've gone, what, 5 releases without fixing (much) in Finder; what makes you think they'll fix it this time around? Wasn't it 10.3 where Apple claimed they were re-writing Finder from scratch, and we ended up with almost the exact same mess of poor usability and terrible bugs we were using before? Hell, I'd be happy if it just didn't utterly freeze for minutes at a time when your network got disconnected-- it's like the Finder programmers never heard of wifi!
It's sad when the one application that is hard-coded to run on every boot for every user is the worst application Apple makes.
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Apple really meant it when they removed "Computer" from their name. So far, they've released the AppleTV, the corresponding 802.11n base station, and are holding back OS X for the iPhone. The only computer update was the rather delayed 4 Core/Processor Mac Pro. Looks like Apple's focus is now firmly on multimedia and entertainment devices rather than computers
As a person who works in higher ed, I hate the fact that lots of new things are announced around the WWDC during the summer. The demand is there from the customers (professors, students), but not enough testing time. I know the world doesn't revolve around higher-ed, but its still a pain.
With a release date of October, I'll have many months to test and play around with things before rolling it out. And since we only buy computers in the July/August timeframe, I won't be taken by surprise when they come with Leopard pre-installed. Heck, they'll be at 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 by Fall 2008.
I don't believe they will loose a lot of sales because of this announcement. A lot of students are getting Macs at the back-to-school time of year specifically because of Leopard- they are getting them because of the total package and the "it just works" mentality. That's not going to change despite the delay. And for those who were going to wait, they now have to make the choice continuing until the October release or biting the bullet and getting a new computer before then.
I'm sure many are cursing up a storm because of this, but at the same time, I bet a lot of support folks like myself are breathing a sigh of relief. Besides, we now know EXACTLY when it will be released (October), not just a general esitmate (like Spring 2007). That's ALOT coming from Apple.
Same kind??? Your math is a little off. 4 months (Leopard) does not equal 3 years (Vista).
I remember when people were complaining about Apple putting out a full-priced major release every year.
I probably would have made the same call. Leopard will be a good product - a competent, incremental improvement on an existing product - but it won't open up any vast new revenue streams like the iPhone (hopefully) will.
This sig is false.
On the really Big Iron, IBM doesn't care either, because they have AIX. Yes those machines will run Linux, but they'll run other, more tightly-controlled, highly-optimized, technologies as well. It's all scale, and at the low end, Intel/AMD has the scale. At the higher-end, then Power + proprietary OS + services becomes competitive. Home desktop is uninteresting because the margins are too thin, product cycles short, and the after-market services non-existant.
The other side is that they still have low-end, 1-4 core Linux-compatible systems, which clock in starting at $3K each. Most of these compete nicely against Itanium or late Alpha systems, and outpace Opterons. In the HPC arena, nothing else has the floating-point chops except the IA-64, and it's not clear that Intel/HP have the guts to push it hard enough to compete. The Power systems are not going to wither away, especially as they gain an increasing foothold in High-performance systems, as well as being the core of IBM's Z-series main-frames and smaller systems. IBM has decided on the customer size it wants to deal with, and unsurprisingly, that size is large, with margins. They're returning to their roots. You'll probably see Sparc and IA-64 dropped long before Power is.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I can't blame Apple for going down this road, because clearly they're hoping for another iPod style success. But, it's a crying shame, that just when they're perfectly positioned to take customer share away from Microsoft's crumbling OS empire, they turn their attention elsewhere. (And I'm no MS hater).
Sure do. I think that was about the same time when users kept complaining about having to buy another Mac OS X upgrade every year, and when the developers were complaining about having to keep up with Apple's breakneck development pace. Right about the same time I seem to recall Apple announcing that they would be slowing the pace of development to give everyone breathing room from here on out. Let's see, yes I do believe that was right around the time Panther came out or shortly thereafter.
Leopard will have some neat stuff and a little performance boost on 64-bit machines, but I'm pretty sure you won't die from being forced to use Tiger for another couple of months. I (for one) applaud them for making the decision to finish a proper QA cycle on the software that's going to run my computer, rather than pawning off some barely-out-of-beta crap on us at the last minute.
Call me when Apple sits on their asses for six years straight without bothering to bring out a single innovation, upgraded hardware or major OS release, while simultaneously attempting to foist a subscription licensing model on you that has you paying a yearly fee for the privilege of getting a "free" upgrade to a new product that doesn't materialize for over half a decade. Call me when Apple puts out a major OS release that isn't faster/better/more feature packed than the last one and doesn't continue to add value for owners of older Apple hardware going all the way back to the first iMac with a Firewire port (1999, that's eight years of Mac models that are officially supported by Apple's most current OS right now).
Anyway, I'd bet that Apple are just giving themselves some breathing room and we'll probably get a surprise announcement about Leopard being already done and available along with some new Mac models, hmmm, just in time for the new school year to start. Wouldn't surprise me one bit either way.
Oh please. You're making it sound as if Tiger will stop working on 1-May-07 and you'll be without a computer for 4 months. Tiger's still a perfectly serviceable OS. Get some perspective.
They've released 10.1-10.4 on time, and pulled off the Intel transition months ahead of schedule.
And let's be honest, it's not as if Tiger doesn't stack up favorably to Vista, and Apple desperately needs Leopard to convince people to switch.