Leopard Pushed Back til October

[Nick Cotton]

Apple has just announced that Leopard will be pushed back til October. Here is the full section from the Apple Hot News website:

Apple 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. [Apr 12, 2007]

Reactions? Thoughts? Angry Ramblings?

[MarvinSum]

As long as it doesn't turn into a "Vista Delay". But still, I guess this shows that they're no longer Apple Computer Inc. AAPL stock is sure going to fall when trading opens today.

Argh, and I'd already saved up to buy Leopard. Oh well, the moolah is going towards a ram upgrade for now.

[MikeFerri]

What terrible news. I was holding off on a purchase until Leopard came out. Now I should just buy something now.

[thewrinklyninja]

Ahh poo!. But at least it gives them more time to tweak things (bootcamp)

[Jim]

Damn. I was really looking forward to exploring a fresh operating system this spring.
Can't say I'm all that surprised though.

[Alec Feld]

Made a post about it.

[Tonio Loewald]

If you want the main reason for the Leopard delay, I'd suggest you look no further than Apple's excellent sales and market share figures for Q1 and Q2 and the iPhone launch in June.

It is simply dumb to launch two guaranteed high profile money making products at the same time (just look at how iPhone totally eclipsed both AppleTV and Airport Extreme* -- both interesting products on their own -- and you could actually BUY the Airport Extreme the day it was announced). The only reason to release Leopard in Q2 of 2007 would have been to bring up lacklustre Mac sales following an expected Vista "surge". Sadly for Microsoft, Vista has been a fizzle, while Apple's share has continued to climb, despite all forecasts.

* Almost no-one seems to know that Airport Extreme is a file and printer server, i.e. for $179 you can set up a home wireless and wired network, file and print server.

So now Apple has the luxury of decoupling the iPhone and Leopard launches, keeping in the headlines.

There may be some technical reasons for delaying Leopard -- it hardly ever hurts to polish a product before release as long as you're not suffering from the Osborne effect (sales drying up in anticipation of your new release) -- but the real reason is marketing.

Oh, and Apple doesn't suffer from the other problem that would hurt Dell in the same situation. Folks aren't afraid of buying a Mac when an OS release is around a corner, because they don't expect upgrading their OS to be astonishingly painful.

[herkamer]

Very good explanation Tonio, I never thought of it like that.