Os X Leopard Delayed 6 Months At Least.

[cdnvic]

Apple puts a leash on its Leopard

By Tom Krazit

http://news.com.com/Apple+puts+a+leash+on+..._3-6175690.html

Story last modified Thu Apr 12 16:16:06 PDT 2007

In the push to get the iPhone out on time, Apple has been forced to delay the release of the next version of Mac OS X until October.

The company revealed the scheduling slip in a press release after the close of the stock market Thursday. The iPhone is still on track for a June release--around the time of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference--but engineers and quality assurance staffers working on Leopard needed to switch projects to ensure the iPhone arrives as planned, Apple said.

As a result, Leopard will not be ready this spring, a time frame that Apple had reiterated several times over the past few months. A "near final" version of the operating system--Mac OS X 10.5--will be distributed to developers at WWDC for testing. The final release will be available in October.

"Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones," Apple said in its press release.

An Apple representative declined to provide more details on the delay, beyond what was included in the statement.

Wall Street reacted immediately, sending Apple's stock down a little more than 2 percent in after-hours trading. "They've shaken people's confidence in their ability to execute," said Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates.

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]

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This must mean problems with the phone, not the OS because the iPhone is supposed to run on Leopard.