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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.'"
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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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.