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Why Apple Delayed Leopard for the iPhone
Ernest DeFarge writes "Apple recently announced that they've pulled several key programmers from the OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and assigned them to the iPhone in order to get it done on time. In doing so, they delayed Leopard for 4 months. Does that mean that the iPhone is more important to Apple than Mac OS? Or is it just capitalizing on the current state of Apple's fanbase?"
You are not getting it. "Mac OS X" is just a marketing name, just as "Microsoft Windows" or "Microsoft Windows Vista" is. When looking for a final name for Rhapsody, Apple realized that in order to avoid alienating the (classic) Mac OS users it was a good idea to give a similar name to the new operating system (just like Windows NT vs old Windows). And since the next mayor version was 10, they decided to call the new OS "Mac OS X", with the X in Roman to differentiate it.
Well, Jobs and his cronies found out that they really liked the big X, and quite frankly XI isn't that appealing, so they decided to name subsequent major versions as 10.2, 10.3, etc. Some day that will wear off, but meanwhile marketing-wise it's working. Minor (point) versions, the equivalent of a less-juicy but more-frequent Windows Service Pack, are named 10.x.y.
The best way to get your mind untangled is to look at Darwin, the underlying OS. It started with a major screw-up with the version numbers, but then Apple recognized that:
1) Darwin/Mac OS X is more a descendant of NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP than of MacOS.
2) Puma (10.1) was more like a huge service pack for Cheetah (10.0). That's not true for the subsequent cats.
Thus, they revised the numbering so that Darwin would fit in the NeXTSTEP lineage. The Darwin versions and the corresponding Mac OS X versions can be found here. Now you see that Jaguar, Panther and Tiger are all major versions.
(For another famous mash-up of version numbers, look at SunOS vs Solaris and the jump of Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7.)
So, assuming that we can make a similar argument for Windows NT 5.1 (aka "XP"), since the year 2000 Microsoft has released:
Windows 2000 and 2000 Server (NT 5.0)
(Windows ME doesn't count, since it was not an NT).
Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.1 & 5.2)
Windows Vista (NT 6.0) (Longhorn Server may be released this year, or more likely next).
And Apple has released:
Cheetah + Server (I'm not counting Puma, which was anyway a free upgrade) (Darwin (screwedup-number)-5.x)
Jaguar + Server (Darwin 6.x)
Panther + Server (Darwin 7.x)
Tiger + Server (Darwin 8.x)
Leopard (+ Server) on October. (Darwin 9.x)
If you want to count all the service packs, MS made around 12 major+minor releases, Apple almost 40. But that's not very significant, since Microsoft packs more into each service pack than Apple does, and that's OK. Only major releases matter.