Thoughts on the Leopard delay announcement and TUAW comments

Instead of debuting Leopard at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA, this June 2007, Apple Inc. (AAPL) will release "a near final version" of Mac OS X 10.5, a sort of preview of the complete feature set at that time. Bad news? Perhaps for the fierce Mac users, but overall? Hmmm. Let me check the facts first.
Apple's iPhone is right on track – passing several required certification tests and is expected to start shipping in late June as originally planned. The device is touted to have the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has come with a price. Engineering resources at AAPL have reportedly been diverted from Leopard to the mobile device, possibly indicating the firmness of Apple's belief that the market holds tremendous promise and business opportunities for the entity.
Despite its forecast of modest sales in the initial year of release, Apple may capitalize and leverage on the hype surrounding the iPhone (e.g., integration of perceived faults of the device such as 3G technology) to eliminate any negative effect on third quarter Mac sales. However, there will still be an earnings hit for that quarter, albeit minor, and Apple knows that its stock may trade on the mobile communication device for a number of weeks.
Apple Inc. has learned well from Microsoft Corp.'s failure to generate positive buzz on Vista. Besides preventing a spill of the negatives associated with Vista's failure over to AAPL's Leopard, it is possible that Steve Jobs has realized that the Mac has been over-rated as a near-term sales driver! Thus, Jobs is positioning the iPhone for short-term cash infusion and the Leopard as the icing on the cake for the long-term haul because, after all, the complete integration of a new OS in both the enterprise and individual level takes around 10 to 12 months. And the decision to allocate resources from one division to another highlights Apple Inc.'s inherent ability to quickly move and shift talent; a lean and mean company with no bloated head count overhead. It also underscores an important fact in the industry, i.e., that a first-release product demands more resources in terms of testing and integration.
After all is said and done, one thing is crystal clear: Apple understands what it is doing. It expects modest sales (iPhone) in the first year. But wait! What if it overshoots its initial target of 10 million units? Possible? You bet! Steve Jobs has that gift of creating hype and excitement and cementing it with product releases perfectly in-tuned to the times.

October's fine. Tiger's fine. Macs are fine. iPhine. etc.

completely agree with #31.

i am happy with Tiger, and the new features in Leopard do not get me excited. I back up my harddisk image every night and didn't see the need of time machine. and many other featrures are already there with third party developers.

I have 4 macs total at work and home. and would like to replace my 1.25 G4 mac mini but the current mini lineup is clearly behind ibook for no obvious reasons.

Does any real Mac user care? The only thing that Apple has to worry about are misinformed switchers who believe that this is the end of the world. Leopard is really not that great, I don't see why anyone would flip out about it. There hasn't been a real change in OS X since 10.3, and even that was fairly minor in terms of whether or not OS X gets the job done. OS X has been largely the same since 10.2, which fixed a lot of the problems that 10.1 had (which fixed most of the 10.0 problems ). Those that think this is anything like Microsoft delaying Vista are sadly sadly misinformed. If Apple had not had any releases since 10.1, THAT could be similar, but this is 10.4 to 10.5, which is basically not doing anything except adding some features which will probably be useful like Time Machine, and others which probably won't be like Spaces. 10.4 was more or less not much different than 10.3 except that it added a few more features that are largely eye candy with no real use (cough cough Expose cough cough, or do people actually find that useful for some reason).

@Virtuous:

Same flawed thinking that MS and my bosses have... Hiring more developers at a problem doesn't get it done quickly. Especially if these developers are new to the company. I have yet to hire anyone that is able to come into a project on their first day and transition into it without a problem. Usually this causes further delays and stress. The OS X devs that were moved to the iPhone project were probably instrumental in getting OS X into the iPhone and that is why they were pulled. Getting replacements for them on either team would have cost them more time. I don't mind the wait. It sucks that TextMate 2 which is slated for Leopard only is pushed back but Apple might get it to us earlier. Remember the transition to Intel?

i guess this means that iLife and iWork will also coming only in October.

The big problem with this delay is no upgrade or new functionality to .mac will be coming to at least October.

Well, as many have already said - Leopard in itself is not holding me back when it comes to upgrading, Tiger is excellent as it is.

What IS holding me back is the lack of Core 2 Duo power in the Mini setup. Let's just hope that Steve releases C2D Mini in June and I'll happily upgrade to Leopard in October.

I'm even happy for this delay as long as it means a better a quality testing for Leopard. Does anyone remember the first 3 or 4 months after Tiger was released and the huge list of bugs and problems many had to suffer from? I do. I think Tiger only became stable by 10.4.2 or .3.

It was also a nice gesture if Apple offered a free or at least a steep discount on Leopard for anyone buying a Mac from May onwards.

It would not be unprecedented for Apple to offer a free Mac OS X upgrade.

Apple press release from 2001 -

New Mac OS X v10.1 Upgrade Available Free to All Mac OS X Owners

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/sep/25osx_available.html

Actually, there was a $20 shipping and handling fee for people who called Apple's support line to order the upgrade.

It would make a lot of sense for Apple to offer a voucher for a free upgrade to Leopard with computers purchased during the back-to-school season.