News: Leopard Delayed Until October

In I’m-sticking-with-my-Motorola-just-to-spite-them news, Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) has been delayed until October because of the number of resources devoted to the iPhone. In a statement from Apple after the stock market closed, Apple further pushed the iPhone and tried to justify the delay:

“We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is…However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price—we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.”

Maybe this is just something that Microsoft will ignore, or maybe Apple will be accused of pulling a Longhorn Vista. Either way, does this really come as a big surprise considering that the January keynote focused mostly on the iPhone?

Although the mobile phone market is huge, did anyone realize the combination of high price and limited carrier choices as shrinking the audience of the iPhone vs. an OS X upgrade? Apple thinks so:

“We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.”