Apple Delays Leopard to October 545
SuperMog2002 writes "Apple Insider has the sad news that Mac OS X Leopard has been delayed until October. Apparantly software engineers and QA had to be reassigned to the iPhone in order to get it out on time, costing Leopard its release at WWDC. For now the original press release from Apple can be found on the 'Hot News' part of their site, though Apple did not provide a permanent link to the story. 'While Leopard's features will be complete by June, the Cupertino-based company said it cannot deliver the quality release expected by its customers within that time. Apple now plans to show its 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 the software in October.'"
Re:October? (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I wouldn't give up one millisecond of developer time from Leopard to iPhone, but that's because I preferred Apple when it was a computer company, not a "consumer electronic lifestyle" company.
All the QA folks! (Score:0, Insightful)
Phew! I was worried after all the hype.
Mod Me down, but I have something to say: (Score:3, Insightful)
Less pieces of shit, more big cats!
Leopard Delay - no big deal for most users (Score:5, Insightful)
I can wait comfortably for another quarter if it means that Leopard will be released as a better operating system than was Tiger when it was released initially.
The bigger concern would seem to me to be the developers who've pegged their next release on feature that are Leopard only. They're going to lose out on four months worth of income. Hopefully the new features in Leopard, especially the under-the-hood suff makes developing so much easier that it's going to be worth it for them.
In the meantime, I'll download a nightly of webkit (safari is the only real annoyance I have on my Mac) and get on with my work.
Better late than buggy (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting that they had to pull engineers off OS X to the iPhone. Most likely, they needed to get the iPhone done in time to meet contractual requirements with Cingular, and there wasn't enough time to hire new staff and train them. It can take months to get even the brightest new hires up to speed and productive, so this is understandable. Especially when training new hires means some of your existing staff is dedicated to that instead of real work. So, in keeping with the dropping of "Computer" from their name, Apple just put the computer stuff on the backburner and took the quick route of using existing, knowledgeable engineers.
Too bad they didn't do better long range forecasting for staffing needs a year or two ago...
Wonder what this'll do to Mac sales, as many people were waiting for a Leopard release before buying? Will people still wait 6 more months, or will they buy now? Will they go PC to spite Apple for the delay?
No surprise, really... (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple isn't retarded, and it is highly unlikely that they would have dumped them in the laps of developers a matter of weeks prior to the final release. That being said, I will go into nerd rage spasms if they don't fix Finder this time around and spend their efforts doing some stupid
Re:Damn (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't it be more like:
going upstream without a paddle?
I often wondered if these sayings are correct, if they were corrupted somehow or if just the definitions of things changed over time.
Slashdot's double standard, as always. (Score:1, Insightful)
Apple Delays anything = I'm glad they're taking the time to make it better.
Re:No surprise, really... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad when the one application that is hard-coded to run on every boot for every user is the worst application Apple makes.
Apple's Shift (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm actually happy with this announcement. (Score:5, Insightful)
With a release date of October, I'll have many months to test and play around with things before rolling it out. And since we only buy computers in the July/August timeframe, I won't be taken by surprise when they come with Leopard pre-installed. Heck, they'll be at 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 by Fall 2008.
I don't believe they will loose a lot of sales because of this announcement. A lot of students are getting Macs at the back-to-school time of year specifically because of Leopard- they are getting them because of the total package and the "it just works" mentality. That's not going to change despite the delay. And for those who were going to wait, they now have to make the choice continuing until the October release or biting the bullet and getting a new computer before then.
I'm sure many are cursing up a storm because of this, but at the same time, I bet a lot of support folks like myself are breathing a sigh of relief. Besides, we now know EXACTLY when it will be released (October), not just a general esitmate (like Spring 2007). That's ALOT coming from Apple.
Re:Mod Me down, but I have something to say: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sounds a lot like Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Same kind??? Your math is a little off. 4 months (Leopard) does not equal 3 years (Vista).
Apple's priorities are no longer the mac (sigh)... (Score:2, Insightful)
The prioritising of getting the iPhone out over getting Leopard to its loyal fan base is not only a slap in the face of Apple's computer users, but I think a mistake on their behalf.
Reason 1.
There are a heap of people out there holding off mac purchases until leopard is released. I know my old work (I just left 2 weeks ago) are holding off buying a new suit of macs until Leopard is released because they do not want to have to purchase leopard separately for every machine, then have to roll out etc. This would be disruptive. There is also a couple people at work who are holding off buying new machines for their personal use until leopard is released.
Reason 2.
iPhone will only be launched initially in the US. Leopard is released worldwide, and therefor a larger userbase to satisfy.
Remember, the press release says that the OS has been delayed to deploy the engineers on the iPhone project. So if they had not done so the iPhone would have been delayed, but Leopard would have been finished earlier. it is not about quality control on the OS for the delay. I just hope this is not a trend where the computer business lags/stagnates because of a focus on getting their lifestyle devices out the door.
Re:Apple's Shift (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:October? (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when people were complaining about Apple putting out a full-priced major release every year.
I probably would have made the same call. Leopard will be a good product - a competent, incremental improvement on an existing product - but it won't open up any vast new revenue streams like the iPhone (hopefully) will.
Re:Welcome To The New Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mod Me down, but I have something to say: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike Vista which was late AND buggy.
Tiger is at 10.4.9 because of bug fixes, not features......
So apple is guilty too.
Re:Welcome To The New Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
The other side is that they still have low-end, 1-4 core Linux-compatible systems [ibm.com], which clock in starting at $3K each. Most of these compete nicely against Itanium or late Alpha systems, and outpace Opterons. In the HPC arena, nothing else has the floating-point chops except the IA-64, and it's not clear that Intel/HP have the guts to push it hard enough to compete. The Power systems are not going to wither away, especially as they gain an increasing foothold in High-performance systems, as well as being the core of IBM's Z-series [ibm.com] main-frames and smaller systems. IBM has decided on the customer size it wants to deal with, and unsurprisingly, that size is large, with margins. They're returning to their roots. You'll probably see Sparc and IA-64 dropped long before Power is.
Re:October? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't blame Apple for going down this road, because clearly they're hoping for another iPod style success. But, it's a crying shame, that just when they're perfectly positioned to take customer share away from Microsoft's crumbling OS empire, they turn their attention elsewhere. (And I'm no MS hater).
You bring the average smugness back up. (Score:2, Insightful)
Keep up the good work.
But lets face facts. Discerning users never used MacOS prior to OSX. It sucked worse then Windows 3.0 in every way.
Re:It is nice to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:October? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Date (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Welcome To The New Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't have to do anything for Microsoft to look bad with Vista. Microsoft is doing a great job of making themselves look bad all on their own. XP was released in 2001. Since then, Apple's released 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4... and 10.4 is already technically superior to Vista, XP, and every other OS that's come out of Redmond. Microsoft delayed Vista numerous times over a span of something like FOUR YEARS, and delivered a stillborn, feature-gutted, annoying, buggy turd that they have to force people to buy by withdrawing XP off the market. How's Apple need to do anything to make Microsoft look bad?
OK, first, Microsoft already has the lead... in marketshare, if not in technical merit. Microsoft isn't worried about whether Vista will allow them to take the lead, they're worried about if Vista will allow them to continue to keep a stranglehold on the commodity x86 desktop OS market. Unfortunately, Apple's not competing against Microsoft directly. Apple insists on allowing their OS to run only on Apple hardware. If you don't have Apple hardware, your choices are Microsoft, or Linux/BSD, (discounting something more obscure and perpetually incomplete, like BeOS or ReactOS). If you have Apple hardware, your choice expands slightly to include the above + OS X, and you'd be pretty silly to buy Apple hardware and not run OS X on it.
Apple marketing loves to make digs at Microsoft because the only difference at this point other than chassis veneer is the operating system, but really Apple competes with other OEMs who sell complete systems, ie hardware with a preinstalled OS -- Dell, HP, etc., not really against Microsoft. It's just that the only basis these days for Apple's differentiation with the Wintel OEMs is what OS the hardware comes bundled with. So while it looks like Apple and Microsoft compete against each other, it's more like they compete in parallel markets -- like track and field runners keeping to separate lanes on a track, not like boxers going head to head beating on each other. But in any event, the current release of OS X already beats the pants off of Windows on technical merits.
Leopard failing to release in 1Q07 doesn't make me any more or less likely to wipe Tiger from my Apple hardware so I can switch to Vista, and it doesn't make me any more likely to go out and buy Leopard to install on my HP laptop. If I buy new hardware from an OEM vendor this year, my choice is likely to be between buying Apple/OS X and building a whitebox and running Ubuntu, as I simply won't consider buying a Vista system at this time, if ever.
However, I seriously hope that Apple doesn't forget about the Macintosh platform, which is the impression that I'm starting to get. At MacWorld, there were no Mac announcements.
Well, the thing is, iPhone and AppleTV do both run OS X. And who do you get to develop OS X for these platforms but OS X developers? It's not a question of abandoning the Mac platform, it's a question of expanding the OS X installation base to encompass appliances and smartphones as well as traditional desktop systems and servers.
The 8-core Mac Pro is stupendous -- you can't even run XP on an 8-core system, period -- you'd need Windows Server Enterprise Edition for that. OS X runs happily on 8 cores without any special uber-expensive edition license... as long as those 8 cores reside in hardware that came from Cupertino, of course.
The other product lines are all running Core 2 Duos at speeds which haven't changed much because clock speeds have stagnated around 3GHz for the last 3 years. So what's there to complain about? What do you envision going into the next revs for the iMac, Mini, and MacBooks that's ready go to today and anything more than a CPU speed stepping right now?
Re:New Finder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:October? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious how a machine with a 2 gigabyte limit on RAM will benefit from 64-bit code, since the main benefit of 64-bit code is to allow your machine to address more than 4 gigabytes of RAM. Seems to be you're never going to have that issue. Now, while I am being snarky, I'm also asking a serious question. It's possible that you know more than I do about this stuff and that there are some benefits to 64-bit code which do not have to do with memory addressing and of which I am not aware. If that's not the case, then it seems to be that you're not losing anything from having to wait for Leopard, other than a reason to complain.
Re:October? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure do. I think that was about the same time when users kept complaining about having to buy another Mac OS X upgrade every year, and when the developers were complaining about having to keep up with Apple's breakneck development pace. Right about the same time I seem to recall Apple announcing that they would be slowing the pace of development to give everyone breathing room from here on out. Let's see, yes I do believe that was right around the time Panther came out or shortly thereafter.
Leopard will have some neat stuff and a little performance boost on 64-bit machines, but I'm pretty sure you won't die from being forced to use Tiger for another couple of months. I (for one) applaud them for making the decision to finish a proper QA cycle on the software that's going to run my computer, rather than pawning off some barely-out-of-beta crap on us at the last minute.
Call me when Apple sits on their asses for six years straight without bothering to bring out a single innovation, upgraded hardware or major OS release, while simultaneously attempting to foist a subscription licensing model on you that has you paying a yearly fee for the privilege of getting a "free" upgrade to a new product that doesn't materialize for over half a decade. Call me when Apple puts out a major OS release that isn't faster/better/more feature packed than the last one and doesn't continue to add value for owners of older Apple hardware going all the way back to the first iMac with a Firewire port (1999, that's eight years of Mac models that are officially supported by Apple's most current OS right now).
Anyway, I'd bet that Apple are just giving themselves some breathing room and we'll probably get a surprise announcement about Leopard being already done and available along with some new Mac models, hmmm, just in time for the new school year to start. Wouldn't surprise me one bit either way.
Re:October? (Score:5, Insightful)
They've released 10.1-10.4 on time, and pulled off the Intel transition months ahead of schedule.
And let's be honest, it's not as if Tiger doesn't stack up favorably to Vista, and Apple desperately needs Leopard to convince people to switch.
Re:ITYM AppleTV on regular screens... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is the same price as a $299 smart phone plus $199 iPod nano. At $299 that is a very cheap smart phone, and the iPhone has the whole nano built-in plus free video playback. The service will also be cheaper than other phones because there is no hardware discount as with other phones.
The thing that people keep skipping over is the Web browser. It's a full desktop Web browser with Web applications support in the palm of your hand. To get that kind of Web browsing you have to go to a MacBook at $1100. Maybe it is only current WebKit users who can appreciate how good this is.
The biggest thing is the software, though. Where other phones have Flash Lite the iPhone has OS X. They can add features painlessly that other phone and handheld computer manufacturers can only dream of.
> AppleTV is priced to sell a lot of units, but there's a hidden cost to it - most people will need to buy a new TV for it.
First, that hidden cost is the cost of TV in 2008. Everybody needs a new TV. It has nothing to do with AppleTV. If you buy a Blu-Ray or HD DVD you will need the same new TV.
> It needs to work well on regular screens without a hack to really take off
Second, it has component outs. These are "DVD era" video outputs, and they work on any TV that has component inputs, which is most everything from the 21st century. This is just downplayed because this kind of "old TV" picture looks so much worse than newer systems which are "computer-ready".
Re:October? (Score:3, Insightful)
The iPhone Is The Computer (Score:3, Insightful)
What is this "advanced availability club"? Are you referring to ADC? Not really all that expensive. ADC memberships [apple.com]. In any case, your timing arguments are just silly. If you were planning to wait until June (e.g. for the final Leopard release) to "develop for Leopard" then Leopard timing obviously isn't critical to your plans, just just wait until October to buy your 8 core machine. Maybe RAM prices will come down a bit by then even and you'll come out ahead.
Re:October? (Score:4, Insightful)
Insert install DVD.
Restart.
Hold down C key after the chime to boot from disc.
Wait.
Select "Archive & Install".
Start installation.
Wait.
Reboot.
Live happily ever after.
The End.
Apple introduced the "Archive & Install" feature with version 10.2 (Jaguar), I think. It does basically what the older Mac OS installers did, renames your current system folder and installs the new version. I personally have never actually used it yet, what with being OCD about system entropy after years of traumatization at the hands of a certain other operating system that used to require reinstallation every six months in order to maintain performance. I prefer to start from scratch whenever possible, but that's just me.
From the comments I have encountered online over the last few years it seems that a great many people have used this feature with great success. Many people appear to have upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 or from 10.2 straight to 10.4 without any trouble at all. It is also touted as an easy way to recover from bad system updates. I've read many accounts from people who nonchalantly Archive & Install all the time, anytime they encounter an issue like that. Apparently it's very fast and doesn't break everything, unlike when you're forced to reinstall Windows which usually wipes out your registry and turns into a nightmare. Fortunately all the user data and configuration information is properly separated from the main system folder and they don't use anything as monstrous as the delicate monolithic Windows registry, so things usually don't get broken just because you reinstalled the OS.
But, more importantly, what is so great about Mac OS X and Mac hardware is that it's so easy to make a complete bootable backup of your entire drive, a clone, onto an external FireWire or USB drive. Then even if something were to go horribly wrong with your upgrade you can just boot from that external drive and clone it back. Voila, you're right back where you started, happy as a clam and ready to try again after you figure out what you did wrong. Try that with a Windows upgrade.
Also I think that when you use Archive & Install you have the option of going to the Startup Disk preferences and choosing to reboot into the previous system folder. This can be done from any restore or install disc in case the machine won't even boot to the desktop for some reason. It's not a complete reversion since a lot of new applications will be installed with the new OS that may not be compatible with the older OS, but it can be useful.
In short, I don't think you'll have any trouble upgrading, although I would wait until the first update comes out. There are always a few issues that never show up until a new OS gets installed by millions of people, no matter how much beta testing and QA cycles you go through. Believe me, there will be plenty of people happy to blaze a trail for you and be the first to find any potential issues and help Apple fix them quickly. Even if you do have an issue, if you follow my advice and always do a backup clone on an external drive it is almost impossible to be unable to quickly recover from anything up to and including total hard drive failure, and go on about your business. AFAIC this ability to recover from almost any possible situation without being forced to reinstall applications, reset hundreds of personal preferences or restore user data piecemeal is one of the best features of owning a Mac, and a big reason that I recommend them to most of my clients (I'm a freelance computer tech).