The elephant in the room: Apple pulls a Microsoft, delays Leopard past original promise

as far as must have's go...

aren't there some memory addressing issues overcome in Leopard?

full bandwidth utilisation, better use of multiprocessors???

For us audio (and the video) users, that is hugely significant.

Apple committed to ANNOUNCING Leopard in August of 2006... and they did.

This headline and this article make me want to unsubscribe. Get your facts straight. I thought the weblogs, inc. guys were supposed to be a level above other blogs journalistically speaking.

The date was Fall 2006 or early 2007 (as in spring). Where were you guys at WWDC 2005?

Hey, but you probably picked up a good chunk of traffic. Dig that.

Who cares. Tiger works fine for now, if it's another quarter or two who the hell cares.

(Well, the guy wearing my AAPL shareholder hat might, but I just kicked him in the nuts and reminded him that no one ever got rich shipping software too early. Then we watched the Orson Welles Paul Mason commercial and settled into an uneasy detente. But I digress...)

So wtf does it matter really. Nothing in the Leopard preview is going to change anyone's life, so ship it when it's ready.

What's even more amusing is that people are buying the "can't show secrets so MSFT can't copy them for Vista" ruse. Uh, yeah, I'm more than a little offended you think we're that brain-dead, Steve.

Vista is feature-fricking-complete. It's at the RC stage and buggily at that. The only thing they're going to be doing bugfixing for the next 6 mos to a year, no one's adding html mail or templates because Leopard "innovated" these into being.

Btw, does MSFT get to do a start your Active Desktop cloning machines campaign now too? The anti-Vista marketing is idiotic. OSX is a great OS, it doesn't need to compete and stake false claims.

Vista's not going to be a near-term competitor for Leopard anyway, I just don't get the obsession.

Moreover, the smokescreen ain't working. Either they weren't ready to demo additional features yesterday or they simply don't exist.

One of the reasons for the Spring release could be that this time Apple would like to ship _after_ Windows Vista to avoid that indirect confrontation and anticipation for something "almost there" and rather square it off with a real (and probably weaker) product.

nda

David... you have flawed reporting when you base your news stories on reports from other mac sites like macnn! You should always base your reporting on statements by Apple execs or press releases. Had you done even a half hearted effort to find an Apple statement saying anything other than Late 2006 / Early 2007 you would have quickly found you couldn't... because Apple has been consistent on this from WWDC 2005 and is still delivering on their promise today.

I'm a Mac user and I watch the keynotes when Apple puts them online. I distinctly remember Steve Jobs saying late 2006/early 2007.

In case my memory failed me, I went on search for the keynote transcript. While I did not find the transcript I found MacObserver's live keynote coverage for the 2005 WWDC and they wrote

"[1:26 PM] Tiger is up to 16% of the Mac OS X installed user base, with Panther still claiming half. That's impressive considering the 6 weeks that Tiger has been available. The next version of Mac OS X will be Leopard, and will be released late 2006 or early 2007." source: http://live.macobserver.com/article/2005/06/wwdc2005_keynote.shtml

Also, Macworld's coverage of the 2005 WWDC quotes Steve Jobs as saying the same thing: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/06/06/liveupdate/index.php

Apple, in this respect, has not pulled a Microsoft. Around the time they demoed Tiger, they even stated that the OS X releases would start spacing out rather than being yearly.

Easy question: Can you provide an official Apple Press Release information that specifies the date that you are making reference? Because, if it doesn't come from Apple, then it's not official. I do hope you aren't taking as reference/fact what rumor site says... which would be dissapointing since you are basing your whole article on it.

Get facts please.

None of you understand what the software development lifecycle is do you?

MS probably wouldn't be able to steal any features even if they wanted to at this point.

That's what service packs and SE editions are for.

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/

That is the video of the keynote at the *2005* WWDC. At 18 minutes and 50 seconds into the presentation Steve Jobs stands on stage, in front of slide that confirms what he then says... "we intend to release Leopard in late 2006, early 2007 about when microsoft intends to release vista."

END OF STORY... this should be sited in detail in an update to the orginial story to prevent misleading folks.