For Mac Eyes Only News: Apple Delays Leopard Until October

We’ll talk about this on our next show of course, but Apple just released a statement that Leopard will be delayed until October and the primary culprit is not Vista compatibility as previously rumored, but…

…the iPhone.

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.”

They say Leopard WILL be feature complete by WWDC, a near final version demoed, and beta copies will be handed out to developers to pound on before Leopard is released from its cage in October.

Apple concludes with:

“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.”

Really Apple (née Computer) Inc?

If we are to take this with a silver lining, we’ll content ourselves by saying that Leopard will be stable, safe and bug free by then … right?

No word on how this will affect iLife ’07 or iWork ’07, but we can only presume they will be held until October as well — and very likely renamed.

Read the entire statement at http://www.apple.com/hotnews/