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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.'"
I guess I'll be dressing up as a Leopard for Halloween this year. I sure hop Flanders it's handing out toothbrushes again.
warning: The above content may test positive for sarcasm and/or could be a failed attempt at humor and as such should be taken with a pound of salt.
I was just bragging to the office MS pundit that Leopard would be out soon. Then I get Vista'd (tm) by APPLE.
Vista'd- to be up a creek without a paddle
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Saying it was delayed it slightly inaccurate since Apple has been saying Spring '07.
Screw the iPhone... I'd rather have updated Macs and a shiny new OS.
Less pieces of shit, more big cats!
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
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?
This was pretty obvious from as early as Mid-March. We knew there would be "secret features" coming, and none of them have thus far appeared in any of the betas.
.Mac integration or comparable bullshit feature that ignores the rotting elephant in the room.
Apple isn't retarded, and it is highly unlikely that they would have dumped them in the laps of developers a matter of weeks prior to the final release. That being said, I will go into nerd rage spasms if they don't fix Finder this time around and spend their efforts doing some stupid
Hi, I'm a Mac.
And I'm a PC.
<squeaky kid voice> I'm an iPhone play with me watch this oh I got a boo-boo make it better daddy let's play catch can I have some ice cream can I can I huh huh oh look a kite I wanna kite mommieee!
Steve Jobs: Damn I forgot how much attention new products need.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am willing to bet that the June developer release, with it's "top secret" new features will give users something to lust over for a few months while Steve Jobs talks it up in the media. Possibly giving users pause over buying their new Vista machine in favor of waiting for a new Mac.
Have you ever noticed how well this works for movies, and music for that matter? Release a movie/song to a small segment of the market (critics, private screenings, etc) in order to create some buzz... then talk about it for a few months... finally releasing it to the consumer and watch it sell like hotcakes on the day it's released. Then they will use the skewed release figures to further market it, saying it was the fastest selling OS of all time, or some bullshit like that, making everyone think that they need to have it since everyone else is getting it too.
You will constantly be thinking about how great it will be to finally get your grubby hands on this OS for months... salivating over reviews and screen shots on any number of review sites until finally you see a rack full of it at your local computer store. Where you will buy it up, take it home, and do nothing more than your doing today with your computer, but it will look prettier.
This all hinges on the idea that Leopard is truly the huge improvement that it's claimed to be... but even if it's not, Apple is a marketing machine and the average user will buy into the hype.
To summarize, Apple could release in June, and probably release a damn fine piece of software. But they want to make us wait, make us want it more, have it consume us... then we will actually think we are getting something so much better than we have today!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
The thing I've found about development is that you can't just throw more at a product. This is Microsoft's problem. They have hundreds and hundreds of developers. Every 5 developers needs a team leader, every couple of team leaders need analysts and project managers, project managers need to have meetings to discuss release schedules, then there's compatability concerns and merging issues. The whole thing becomes an incredibly hard-to-steer buraucracy, where five or six dedicated developers would have sufficed.
Companies can only really focus on a few products, regardless of size, you just can't be everything to everybody, because the friction of beuracracy will just slow to standstill.
I think Apple are right to stagger development like this, it shows patience, understanding and maturity.
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Why so glum? Now you can look forward to it even longer.
Apple just can't seem to match Microsofts's superior delay history. Microsoft has already astounded the world by an amazing THREE YEAR delay in the original Vista release date and the actual delay; this impressive delay is one of the longest delays for a product that actually eventually made it out of the front door instead of dying...
And here's Apple, trying to out-do Microsoft, and the best then can do is delay Leopard for three lousy months - and technically speaking, it's not much of a delay since the original release date was "Spring 07".
I mean, come on, Apple. Surely you can break something in Leopard to force a longer delay. Microsoft wins, hands down. Apple still lags way behind MS on viruses, as well. With my Windows machine, unpatched, I have THOUSANDS of viruses that can infect my machine if I want to. Apple just doesn't give me that ability. Maybe they just don't care.
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
Bill Gates had beans today. Nothing for you to see here, move along.
Great Intellect...
Windows fans everywhere, admiring the pretty Macs in the window: "If only our biggest complaint was having to wait two and a half years instead of just two years for a new OS release."
"Sufferin' succotash."
hmmm. remember OSX 10.0? Quoth Wiki:
"The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Many critics suggested that while the OS was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSX
I also seem to remember a total absence of a DVD player...
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
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.
So I see my OS choices in the next five years as: Windows Vista, Mac's OS X, or some Linux variant.
I don't really want to do another Windows. As long as the Mac has Blizzard's support with games like WoW, I may actually be able to abandon Windows. I've tried Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Let's just say I'm an idiot and I'm good at breaking X without knowing how to fix it. I've got a stable, backed up Linux virtual machine that I'm very happy with, and I can use that to write papers in TeX and do assignments for my uni courses; but I don't really feel comfortable with performing any kind of minor or even cosmetic surgery on Linux. I'd really like to, but after breaking each distro with minor config changes...
Anyway! The actual question!
I read in other articles and on Wiki that Leopard will run on x86 Intel style CPUs, and that this particular version you're actually allowed to run on non-Apple specific hardware. I also read that it wouldn't be running on AMD. That doesn't make sense as I thought deep down the only difference was optimizations, and even AMD gets to have those if it's old enough. MMX, SSE1&2, etc.
Can someone please clarify this? Will I be able to run Leopard on my OEM self-built AMD 64 3000+ based machine?
Sorry, I'm new to mac .... what is so crummy about the Finder in Tiger? I've had some difficulties using it, but always penned it as user error. What was good about previous implementations?
It has terrible usability design, with two "modes" (a Windows-esque 'browser' mode, and a Mac Classic 'spatial' mode), neither of which work correctly. The Spotlight UI, in particular, is almost criminally complex and quirky... a Linux/Windows user might not notice it, but to a Mac Classic user it's like fingernails on a chalkboard. People used to Classic are driven spare by the Command-N keyboard shortcut that used to create a new folder, but now creates a new window-- even in Spatial mode (which makes no sense.)
If you have make the horrible error of trying to open a network drive when the network it's on is no longer available (you know, like the huge number of people who use wifi on their laptops), Finder will freeze for minutes at a time. Finder will also freeze for several minutes if you have the audacity to drag-and-drop files to the desktop from some applications. DotMac will also freeze Finder for several minutes if it attempts to sync itself while on an un-reliable network. There's no multi-threading whatsoever.
Opening a window with a large number of images will frequently crash Finder as it creates thumbnails. And no, it's not a corrupt image file, because if I do the same view in Windows, Windows will create the thumbnails in seconds with no errors. When Finder's image previews do work, generating them is super-slow.
It's still missing features that were in Mac Classic, like tabbed folders. (Although to be fair, they have added Labels back in and Pop-Open drag&drop.) Text clippings are nearly useless, as you can no longer drag them directly into a word processor/edit field (like in OS 9), nor can you select and Copy text from them. Oh, and Finder will silently delete the contents of old Mac Classic text clippings, so I hope you didn't have a bunch of important passwords in one or anything... oops!
If you create a new file on the CLI, it still won't show up right away in Finder. You frequently have to 'prod' Finder into showing it, by closing and re-opening the window, or creating a new folder and then deleting it.
It's just bad. Given, a bad Macintosh file browser is still as good as the average Linux or Windows file browser, but that's not much of an excuse, especially for us old-school Mac users. I'd be happy if they fixed some of the more blatant bugs and added tabbed folders, even if it's not a total re-write.
Comment of the year
Same kind??? Your math is a little off. 4 months (Leopard) does not equal 3 years (Vista).
On the otherhand Leopard has had me excited. I have been wanting virtual desktops on OS X since it came out, the the third party implementations have all be lacking, so I am very excited about Spaces. I am also quite interested in Time Machine as I have never seen a backup system easy enough for my parents to use, and have never seen any backup system that makes it as slick and easy to find the correct revision of a backed up documents.
In addition, several of the apps I use are getting outdated as the developers no longer support Panther (including some Apple ones). And to top it all off, I'd like to get a new machine and was naturally waiting for Leopard to come out so I don't have to pay another $150 dollars in 6 months. So the delay is somewhat of a big deal to me. That said I would much rather have stable software than an early release date. That goes for anyone, not just Apple.
I'm personally also not too fond of the Intel switch, myself. Don't get me started on the x86 (little endian, lack of registers, CISC instruction set, etc.). However, Apple had very little choice but to switch. Besides, Intel's Pentium M and Core chips were getting very great performance for their power consumption, which is another factor. Plus, my complaints of the x86 comes from an architectural standpoint. But they do the job, and I like my Core Duo in my MacBook, thank you very much.
Once again, I have no problem with Apple branching out to consumer electronics. However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements. The only hardware update that we've received since November was the new 8-core Mac Pros. Where is iWork 2007 (or even iLife 2007 for that matter)? I don't want the Mac to go the way of the old pre-Fiorina HP calculators; heavily demanded, great quality products that are no longer made (of the same quality) simply because the company wanted to rebrand itself. I've seen these trends in the technology industry before. The Mac is the heart of Apple. I know it's wrong to be attached to products, but I like my Mac a lot. It makes my job much easier, and I can't imagine having to go back to Windows, Linux, and BSD. Where will I go if something happened to my Mac and you can't get another new one? I think this is the sentiment of some of us Mac users.
I realize this has already been modded flamebait, but I just had to point out that Apple dumped IBM, not the other way around. I challenge anyone to cite a credible source that says otherwise. IBM wouldn't deliver the kind of chips Apple wanted (G5 chips usable in mobile applications) without Apple forking over a substantial amount of money to help IBM finish the development cycle. That's assuming IBM ever made much headway on that effort to begin with.
(In fairness to IBM, they couldn't justify making the G5 a high priority and soak up all the R&D costs to make it low-power and fit within a laptop-appropriate thermal envelope. They couldn't justify that because the volume of systems that Apple ships is simply not large enough for IBM.)
Also, while it's true that Apple shopped around to both AMD and Intel, they never sourced processors from AMD, so it's a bit misleading to say that they ran "to [...] AMD, and then finally Intel."
As for delaying the OS because of the iPhone, I don't see that as a major problem. OS X 10.4 is still competitive with Windows, even Vista. There's no reason to rush Leopard (10.5) to market, and the users wouldn't stand for a rushed OS product since, you know, they tend to rely on the stability of their Macs for productivity and so forth. The company has finite engineering and QA resources, and since they pre-announced the iPhone, the clock is ticking on that product. They don't dare slip the iPhone schedule or the competition will eat their lunch, and the iPhone will be stillborn. The consequences of this logic should be obvious.
As a general rule, the buying public is more tolerant of software delays than hardware delays.
I'll agree with most of that, but the cmd-N = new window, not new folder is just the Finder fitting in with the rest of the OS, where it almost universally performs this action. I admit that it doesn't make much sense in the pseudo-spatial mode, but then, what does?
(Hint: Open Apple Menu > System Preferences...; Click Keyboard & Mouse; Switch to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab; click the + button below the list; choose Finder for the application, type 'New Folder' in the Menu Title box, and press cmd-N in Keyboard Shortcut. Lather, rinse and repeat for 'New Window' (note lack of the word 'Finder', the only difficult thing about this) and shift-cmd-N.
It's obviusly the marketing guys who's delaying it. They just want to release it 10/5.
:hint: Get a free developer account from Apple at http://developer.apple.com/
You need it to report OS X/Apple Software bugs anyway.
It is a preview release btw. Don't forget to send the reports and respect Apple NDA.
I want Leopard, I really do, but honestly Tiger is a great OS and I can live a few months more with it.
The IPhone however, we need to be great.
For those of you that think iPods, AppleTVs, and iPhones are supplanting the Mac for Apple, you clearly weren't listening to Jobs from the early days of his return.
He said that digital lifestyle was the future and the Mac was the centre of that.
Every time someone buys one of these digital lifestyle devices and find they work better on the Mac, they will consider a Mac for their next computer.
Back in the 90s Microsoft effectively killed the Mac in enterprise by releasing good Windows Office and bad Mac Office.
Digital lifestyle is Apple's MS Office.
Don't sweat it - the Mac stays.
So, it has some networking issues, and it really shouldn't default to opening new windows in browser mode. Otherwise, it's just fine. Despite the whining, it has made a lot of progress since 10.0.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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
Exactly. From my experience, most "normal" Mac users don't know the difference between a CPU and Powersupply. I upgraded a friend's Mac from Panther to Tiger and it took me a full 20 minutes to explain to her what I was doing because she thought Panther was built-into the Mac and couldn't comprehend how it could be replaced. She actually asked me if I ripped open the computer while she was in the bathroom!
To be more explicit: you can download Java 6 preview for Mac OS X releases with a free developer account.
Apple doesn't have to do anything for Microsoft to look bad with Vista. Microsoft is doing a great job of making themselves look bad all on their own. XP was released in 2001. Since then, Apple's released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4... and 10.4 is already technically superior to Vista, XP, and every other OS that's come out of Redmond. Microsoft delayed Vista numerous times over a span of something like FOUR YEARS, and delivered a stillborn, feature-gutted, annoying, buggy turd that they have to force people to buy by withdrawing XP off the market. How's Apple need to do anything to make Microsoft look bad?
OK, first, Microsoft already has the lead... in marketshare, if not in technical merit. Microsoft isn't worried about whether Vista will allow them to take the lead, they're worried about if Vista will allow them to continue to keep a stranglehold on the commodity x86 desktop OS market. Unfortunately, Apple's not competing against Microsoft directly. Apple insists on allowing their OS to run only on Apple hardware. If you don't have Apple hardware, your choices are Microsoft, or Linux/BSD, (discounting something more obscure and perpetually incomplete, like BeOS or ReactOS). If you have Apple hardware, your choice expands slightly to include the above + OS X, and you'd be pretty silly to buy Apple hardware and not run OS X on it.
Apple marketing loves to make digs at Microsoft because the only difference at this point other than chassis veneer is the operating system, but really Apple competes with other OEMs who sell complete systems, ie hardware with a preinstalled OS -- Dell, HP, etc., not really against Microsoft. It's just that the only basis these days for Apple's differentiation with the Wintel OEMs is what OS the hardware comes bundled with. So while it looks like Apple and Microsoft compete against each other, it's more like they compete in parallel markets -- like track and field runners keeping to separate lanes on a track, not like boxers going head to head beating on each other. But in any event, the current release of OS X already beats the pants off of Windows on technical merits.
Leopard failing to release in 1Q07 doesn't make me any more or less likely to wipe Tiger from my Apple hardware so I can switch to Vista, and it doesn't make me any more likely to go out and buy Leopard to install on my HP laptop. If I buy new hardware from an OEM vendor this year, my choice is likely to be between buying Apple/OS X and building a whitebox and running Ubuntu, as I simply won't consider buying a Vista system at this time, if ever.
However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements.
Well, the thing is, iPhone and AppleTV do both run OS X. And who do you get to develop OS X for these platforms but OS X developers? It's not a question of abandoning the Mac platform, it's a question of expanding the OS X installation base to encompass appliances and smartphones as well as traditional desktop systems and servers.
The 8-core Mac Pro is stupendous -- you can't even run XP on an 8-core system, period -- you'd need Windows Server Enterprise Edition for that. OS X runs happily on 8 cores without any special uber-expensive edition license... as long as those 8 cores reside in hardware that came from Cupertino, of course.
The other product lines are all running Core 2 Duos at speeds which haven't changed much because clock speeds have stagnated around 3GHz for the last 3 years. So what's there to complain about? What do you envision going into the next revs for the iMac, Mini, and MacBooks that's ready go to today and anything more than a CPU speed stepping right now?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!