Apple released a statment on Thursday saying that Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, will be delayed until October 2007. The company cited resources that had been diverted away from Mac OS X to complete iPhone as the cause of the delay.
“iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests
and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We canit wait until
customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a
revolutionary and magical product it is,” the statement said.
“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(R) X team, and as a result we
will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference
in early June as planned.
“While Leopardis features will be complete by
then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers
expect from us. We now plan to show our 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 Leopard in October. We think it will be
well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case weire
sure weive made the right ones.”