Apple Delays "Leopard" Release, Blames iPhone

Disappointing news from Cupertino today, as Apple announced that it's pushing back the release of Leopard, the much-anticipated new version of Mac OS X, so that another big name product—the iPhone—could make it out the door on time.

Mac OS 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, was slated to arrive in June with such new features as automated backups and an improved e-mail app. But Apple announced today that Leopard won't see the light of day until October, because it had to "borrow" engineers and quality-assurance workers from the OS group for the iPhone team, which is facing a June release date.

The news represents a rare slice of humble pie for Apple, which prides itself on hitting ship dates and regularly tweaks Microsoft for missing its own; indeed, there was talk last year that Leopard might actually beat Vista in stories, but clearly, that ain't happening now.

So, how bad is the news for us Macheads? Personally, I'm disappointed but somewhat shy of devastated. While I'm always eager to load up the latest iteration of the Mac OS, Leopard looks like more of an incremental release than Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger", which introduced us to Spotlight universal search, RSS feeds in Safari, the Automator for auto task repetition, and the Dashboard. While the promised Time Machine auto-backup utility certainly sounds cool, most of Leopold's new features are basically improvements on existing apps. All that said, October sure feels like a long ways away.

Related:
Apple delays launch of operating system [Yahoo! News]
Mac OS 10.5 Leopard page