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.'"
Delay and sales (Score:1, Interesting)
Considering the secret features aren't in yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming there really are big new secret features, like Jobs promised, anyway, they would require extensive testing including all kinds of real world testing in developers' systems, new SDKs, etc. Guess what we've seen so far?
I wonder.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Marketing Ploy... and a good one! (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever noticed how well this works for movies, and music for that matter? Release a movie/song to a small segment of the market (critics, private screenings, etc) in order to create some buzz... then talk about it for a few months... finally releasing it to the consumer and watch it sell like hotcakes on the day it's released. Then they will use the skewed release figures to further market it, saying it was the fastest selling OS of all time, or some bullshit like that, making everyone think that they need to have it since everyone else is getting it too.
You will constantly be thinking about how great it will be to finally get your grubby hands on this OS for months... salivating over reviews and screen shots on any number of review sites until finally you see a rack full of it at your local computer store. Where you will buy it up, take it home, and do nothing more than your doing today with your computer, but it will look prettier.
This all hinges on the idea that Leopard is truly the huge improvement that it's claimed to be... but even if it's not, Apple is a marketing machine and the average user will buy into the hype.
To summarize, Apple could release in June, and probably release a damn fine piece of software. But they want to make us wait, make us want it more, have it consume us... then we will actually think we are getting something so much better than we have today!
Re:I wonder.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds a lot like Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies can only really focus on a few products, regardless of size, you just can't be everything to everybody, because the friction of beuracracy will just slow to standstill.
I think Apple are right to stagger development like this, it shows patience, understanding and maturity.
Re:Mod Me down, but I have something to say: (Score:3, Interesting)
Steve Jobs will be demoing a "feature complete" Leapard at WWDC, so we'll know what we're getting and finally get to see the "top secret features." Already, the new dev build that was released today has abolished all brushed metal--every app looks like iTunes 7, even Mail. I don't mind a few months of polish to get everything right. Lord knows Vista could have used it.
And before the Windows trolls come out of the woodwork to defend the flop that is Vista, a four month delay is a major difference from a four year delay. And Apple is actually releasing successful products in the meantime.
Re:This must be fake (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It is nice to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
"The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Many critics suggested that while the OS was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSX [wikipedia.org]
I also seem to remember a total absence of a DVD player...
Bugs me (Score:5, Interesting)
On the otherhand Leopard has had me excited. I have been wanting virtual desktops on OS X since it came out, the the third party implementations have all be lacking, so I am very excited about Spaces. I am also quite interested in Time Machine as I have never seen a backup system easy enough for my parents to use, and have never seen any backup system that makes it as slick and easy to find the correct revision of a backed up documents.
In addition, several of the apps I use are getting outdated as the developers no longer support Panther (including some Apple ones). And to top it all off, I'd like to get a new machine and was naturally waiting for Leopard to come out so I don't have to pay another $150 dollars in 6 months. So the delay is somewhat of a big deal to me. That said I would much rather have stable software than an early release date. That goes for anyone, not just Apple.
Re:Welcome To The New Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm personally also not too fond of the Intel switch, myself. Don't get me started on the x86 (little endian, lack of registers, CISC instruction set, etc.). However, Apple had very little choice but to switch. Besides, Intel's Pentium M and Core chips were getting very great performance for their power consumption, which is another factor. Plus, my complaints of the x86 comes from an architectural standpoint. But they do the job, and I like my Core Duo in my MacBook, thank you very much.
Once again, I have no problem with Apple branching out to consumer electronics. 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. The only hardware update that we've received since November was the new 8-core Mac Pros. Where is iWork 2007 (or even iLife 2007 for that matter)? I don't want the Mac to go the way of the old pre-Fiorina HP calculators; heavily demanded, great quality products that are no longer made (of the same quality) simply because the company wanted to rebrand itself. I've seen these trends in the technology industry before. The Mac is the heart of Apple. I know it's wrong to be attached to products, but I like my Mac a lot. It makes my job much easier, and I can't imagine having to go back to Windows, Linux, and BSD. Where will I go if something happened to my Mac and you can't get another new one? I think this is the sentiment of some of us Mac users.
Re:New Finder... (Score:2, Interesting)
- No way to force Finder to use a single view mode (eg, open all windows in list view)
- Clicking & holding the mouse while using list view:
- - If you click over top of a file, and then move the mouse, you will drag the file
- - If you click in the whitespace directly to the right of the file, and then move the mouse, you will select whatever file's whitespace the cursor passes over
- The 'show disk size / free space' on the desktop only seems to update itself when you reboot
- Finder will try and generate previews of movies, if you are stupid enough to click on them while in column view. If you click on a +700mb file, this can take awhile. Oh, and it makes you wait until it finishes
- As far as I can tell, it is impossible to force finder to always calculate folder sizes. This is related to the list-view problem: the scheme for defining how a folder is presented is exceedingly complicated, and there is _no_ way to force global settings on all folders.
- The rules defining how windows are ordered (from 'top' to 'bottom') are broken. One of two things _should_ happen: either all windows owned by the active application should sit on top of whatever else is being drawn (the macos classic way); or, individual windows should remain disconnected from other windows owned by their application. Instead, the current macos has a cumbersome mix of these two methods, resulting in behavior that is infrequent yet infuriating.
That about all I can think of now
Date (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's that huge sigh of relief ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Looks like Vista will have a few more months to get its act together.
I would never,ever want Apple to release an incomplete, problematic OS for my Macs and naturally my work environment We are speaking about Intel, the ultimate MS Friend, the "Tel" in Wintel publicly saying "we won't upgrade until SP1 Ships" for new MS Windows. Imagine that.
Re:It is nice to see... (Score:3, Interesting)
"The initial version was slow, not feature complete, and had very few applications available at the time of its launch, mostly from independent developers. Many critics suggested that while the OS was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSX [wikipedia.org]
I also seem to remember a total absence of a DVD player...
I always see half of the reason behind those evil, paranoid Apple NDA stuff is the 10.0 preview experience too.
Re:No surprise, really... (Score:3, Interesting)
If they wanted to add a browser mode in addition to the normal Finder mode, that would be fine with me-- as long as they didn't break the normal Finder mode in the process.
Mac users need iPhone more than Leopard (Score:5, Interesting)
The IPhone however, we need to be great.
For those of you that think iPods, AppleTVs, and iPhones are supplanting the Mac for Apple, you clearly weren't listening to Jobs from the early days of his return.
He said that digital lifestyle was the future and the Mac was the centre of that.
Every time someone buys one of these digital lifestyle devices and find they work better on the Mac, they will consider a Mac for their next computer.
Back in the 90s Microsoft effectively killed the Mac in enterprise by releasing good Windows Office and bad Mac Office.
Digital lifestyle is Apple's MS Office.
Don't sweat it - the Mac stays.
Re:Apple's Shift (Score:3, Interesting)
Honestly, I think Apple wants to push computing a little more -- give us better computers in our pockets and our living rooms, not just better computers on our desks. Sure, a living room computer will be optimized for living room stuff, like watching shows and movies, and a pocket computer will naturally be very different from a Mac Pro.
But it's still computing, even if you call it a phone. I think they dropped the "Computer" because they want people to think beyond the box-on-a-desk.
I hope SOMEONE does (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:October? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:October? (Score:5, Interesting)
The iPhone is not to blame. They just wanted to say "iPhone NOT delayed" at the same time as they announce that Leopard is delayed. The first thing I thought when I saw Leopard in October was does that mean iPhone in October, also? It is running OS X Leopard one would assume, not Tiger. So they are saying don't worry you'll get your iPhone.
You could more easily make the case that the Intel switch caused the Leopard delay. Didn't releasing an entirely separate clone of Tiger on Intel architecture tax their Mac OS X team and QA resources more than building software for the iPhone?
Anyway, iPhone is going to be nothing but good for OS X. It may double the user base in five years leading to more development money and also greater compatibility. For example, every iPhone user is a WebKit user, so if CEO's are demanding iPhone compatibility from their corporate Web sites then they are demanding Mac compatibility and indeed W3C compatibility also. Right now they want to see it run in Explorer that is not good for anyone.
> BTW: anyone think this is a way to head off the "Mac nano" aka Apple TV running Mac OS X?
The CPU in the AppleTV is an Intel Pentium M 1 GHz that has been under clocked so it runs cool because it is the GPU that does all the work in AppleTV, displaying swoopy graphics and decoding an H.264 video stream. You also can't upgrade the RAM, there are many other problems with making this into a Mac. It is only half a Mac at best.
If you have a copy of Mac OS X and all you have in your Mac hardware budget is $300 then you are better on eBay. Any Power Mac G4 is a faster Mac with many other features also, like Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 400/800, multiple USB busses, PCI, optical drive, 2 GB or more RAM capacity, space for four hard disks.
If I may quote Steve Jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
That's exactly what happens at the moment. I think it's sad, nevertheless, you can't say Mr. Jobs doesn't keep his promises. The iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV are obviously the next great things.
Re: More Registers makes happy SIMD (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:October? ISV's Will Be Annoyed (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:New Finder... (Score:3, Interesting)
- No file descriptors open. In which case, just silently unmount it. If the user tries to access it again, then a userspace app (e.g. The Finder) can try to re-mount it.
- File descriptors open read-only. In which case, unmount it and return an error the next time an app tries to read from the file descriptor. This can then be handled in userspace (e.g. trying to re-mount, and notifying the user if it fails).
- File descriptors open read-write. In this case, you should retain the cached copy of the file. Try to re-mount. If this succeeds, replay the journal and then finish writes if you are in a consistent state. If you are not in a consistent state, you have a problem, so notify the user and let them try to fix it (save elsewhere, etc).
OS X does none of these right.Ignorance is cross-platform (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I'm not bullshitting, lying, or exaggerating. I'm also not leaving out any extenuating details. The guy is really that dumb, and half of our users are as bad or worse. In my experience a "normal" computer user, PC or Mac, refers to their computer as either "the hard drive" or "the box part", and thinks that if you replace their monitor they'll lose all of their desktop icons.
Re:The iPhone Is The Computer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:October? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well there are several questions and factors to be considered here.
How good is the x64 implementation of OSX. Past versions of OSX's x64 support are barely funtional beyond a developer's point of view, as the OS doesn't use the important aspects of the x64 architecture to gain performance.
If Leopard does provide an outstanding 'fully' implemented x64 version of OSX and not a hybrid as it appears it is going to be, there would be many benefits beyond extended RAM addressing.
The x64 architecture has many things that open the door for increased performance. There are many modes that doesn't cater to x32 legacy routes that are performance bottlenecks.
Even though applications running 64bit would in theory consume a bit more RAM, in number crunching applications, jamming 64bits together at a time is far more efficient than jamming two chunks of 32bits together.
If you look at other OSes with 'good' 64bit implementation, performance is increased for all applications because the OS itself is performing faster. Vista x64 or XP x64 are good examples of this. Even when running old 32bit applications, they perform faster than running the x32bit version of the OSes on the same hardware. And as applications ship in 64bit versions, the performance will continue to increase.
Everything thinks that the jump from 16bit to 32bit was better because of the RAM addresses and the modes the 386 CPUs offered over the 286 CPUS, but there was a lot of performance gains in just the pure math of dealing with one 32bit chunk instead of two 16bit chunks. I can still remember the debates from back then saying that 32bit was going to be slower even though it offered more features. However, the increase in the amount of data being shoved around easier proved this to be incorrect.
It is also worth reading up on the x64 extensions in both the Intel and AMD CPUs, as there are many changes when running in native x64 bit mode at the OS level that are very significant when it comes to performance.