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April 13, 2007
Hold the iPhone ... Leopard will be late
A couple of months away from the release of the yet-unborn-but-celebrated iPhone, Apple has suddenly discovered that the "most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device" apparently won't be ready in June, after all, unless it throws more developers at the project.
That's easy for a genius like Steve Jobs. Just take some developers off the equally sophisticated and much-awaited Leopard OS development. But. Hang on. What about the early June shipment date for Leopard? Won't that, you know, change the Leopard's spots?
No problems. The world's most innovative company has just informed the world that it's put the Leopard launch back until October, on account of moving the labour force to iPhone. But might this robbing of Peter to remunerate Paul not irritate Mac customers, who've REALLY been looking forward to Leopard, given it's been two years since Tiger hit the shelves? Apple has thought about that too, with some what you might call directed philosophy: "Life often presents tradeoffs," it declares, with the subtlest whiff of cigar smoke, "and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones." In other words, "Be cool, and leave everything to us."
So what issues might have beset the iPhone, requiring the re-assignment of resources? Apple zealots have been pooh-poohing John Dvorak for suggesting that one of the sophisticated iPhone breakthroughs achieved with this "revolutionary and magical product" is a battery that (a) is not removable and (b) lasts a breathtaking 40 minutes. But maybe he's right after all.
And it looks like Leopard has some revolutionary and magical features too. According to the Apple 2.0 blog ["Mac news from outside the reality distortion field via Business 2.0"]:
Word that the long-awaited upgrade might be pushed back until October first circulated in late March. At the time, there was speculation that Apple might be holding up the release to make their OS more compatible with Microsoft's Vista (MSFT), a theory that was widely dismissed. But even then, outside programmers working with Apple had complained that the interim versions of Leopard -- the so-called builds -- coming out of Cupertino were unusually buggy for a major OS upgrade this late in the game and were not following the usually release pattern: a flurry of increasingly refined builds followed by silence before the final release.
Could it be that those long delays in Microsoft operating systems could be somehow programmed into Intel chips?
Posted by cw at April 13, 2007 11:59 AM
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