Musings from The Software Underground

No, no it isn't. Honestly, the slip to October isn't surprising and it's not a big deal, or any kind of embarrassment. Please, comparing Apple's 4 month delay to the (conservative) 2+ year slip of Vista, like John Markoff of the New York Times, did is a joke.

Leopard, even by Apple's publicly available list, has a lot going on under the hood that needs to be done right. Apple, with this delay, isn't throwing out new features like MSFT did when Vista was slipping *cough* WinFS *cough* so honestly I see the release date move as more about quality.

Was the slippage also caused by development of the iPhone? Daniel over at Red Sweater seems to worry about that. While it wouldn't surprise me if some developers were moved from Mac OS X to iPhone OS X, I wonder if blaming the slip on the iPhone was more of a marketing idea than an actual fact. I guess it remains to be seen how well Apple handles development on the many fronts it has now opened up (Mac, iPhone, AppleTV, iPod) and if there really are staffing problems. (I do think that Daniel's musings about Apple's desire to concentrate everything in Cupertino hurting them is right on. I'd love to see an Apple Development East in, say, the greater Boston area).

One thing this "slip" does certainly do is make all of the analyst/rumor mongers look like idiots, especially the ones claiming a March release date. It also makes WWDC a lot more important, I think, which has me questioning whether or not I should try harder to attend now. More than likely, that's where all of these "secret" features will be unveiled.

The delay also pushes back planned "Leopard-only" releases, which is probably either a blessing or a curse I guess, and probably pushes back a lot of people's decisions to buy a new Mac, which could hurt Apple's sales near-term.

The end of the world, or the end of Apple however, it is not.

Labels: Mac Musings