« March 2007 | Main | June 2007 »

April 12, 2007

Leopard pushed back to October

Apple had said since their developer conference in 2006 (WWDC) that Leopard - the next version of MacOS X - would ship in Spring 2007. The timing of the 2007 WWDC (June) had everyone reasonably expecting that Apple would ship Leopard then.

Developers and other Apple followers had begun to wonder. Steve Jobs had alluded to unannounced (some called them “secret”) features in Leopard that weren’t part of the 2006 WWDC demo or subsequent Sneak Peak on the Apple website - yet nothing had shown up in recent developer builds. Moreover, recent advance developer builds still had a long list of issues, which didn’t forbode well for a mid/late June release.

Today, the other shoe dropped. Apple issued a statement pushing back the release of Leopard to October - a delay of four months. The statement attributes the delay to reallocation of resources to finish iPhone development - also scheduled for June.

Four months. Big deal, right?

Well, there are a few potential cascade effects:

First, the developers. Leopard has many significant features under the hood - enough that several independent developers have been planning on having their next major product releases be Leopard-dependent. This pushes their upgrade cycle back four months… and not every independent/small developer has four months of cash in the bank.

There’s also the educational market (I spent 14 years running IT in higher ed). Operating on a July-to-June fiscal year, education does the vast majority of their upgrades during the summer months and strives for a stable and relatively unchanging environment during the school year. With the school year starting in September, there’s no way that educational IT will do broad Leopard deployment in the 2007/2008 school year. This delay means that Apple won’t see broad adoption of Leopard in education until the 2008/2009 school year.

And lastly, there’s hardware. The rumor mill had bees discussing revisions to the laptop and iMac lines this summer - involving significant redesigns and potential new technologies such as LED backlit displays and solid state disks. New Apple hardware almost always requires the latest version of the OS, and it’s possible that new hardware was being developed with Leopard in mind. If that’s the case, Apple either has to rev Tiger to support the new hardware or push the hardware back to match the October date for Leopard. Again, a pushback would mean missing the lucrative education buying window.

Apple’s choice to devote resources to iPhone development at the cost of Leopard’s ship date - especially when that means missing sales windows for target markets such as higher education - shows just how important the iPhone is to Apple. Not to mention that it hints of signed agreements for certain ship dates.

I’d been assuming that there would be a lot of iPhone-related goodness in Leopard. That’s still likely to be the case, but the iPhone is still going to have to shine on Tiger this June…

Posted by jim at 03:13 PM