David Emery Online

Slippage

12 April 2007

You may have notcied that Apple today announced that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will be delayed till October.

This is great news.

Before I get any further, I must point out that yes, I’m sure I’ve blogged about Vista slipping and made sarky comments in Microsoft’s direction about it and yes this post is probably all a little hypocritical and Apple-apologist.

Sorry.

Anyway, Leopard slipping is most definitely a good thing. It is, quite simply, the most important release of Mac OS X to date (as mentioned in my recent Apple reality check) as it’s the first one with any vague half-decent competition (Vista).

So it’s got to be really, really good.

The builds and features that we’ve seen so far have had a whole host of really interesting features, like Time Machine, Spaces, the improvements to Mail etc. But these are all “just” interesting features – other then Time Machine there’s really nothing extra special, just lots and lots of nice new features (and a boat load of under the hood stuff for developers).

What we’re all hoping for, of course, is a brand new UI in Leopard; something that moves the game on and makes Vista’s Aero theme look old fashioned.

As time moved on, and we got closer and closer to the June deadline, it was getting less and less likely that we were going to see one; to ship a new interface in Leopard they need to give developers at least a couple of months heads up, so they can make sure their apps work ok with it, which means Apple would have had to show it publicly now for it to be ready to ship in May. In fact, I bet that today would have been the day, if things hadn’t slipped.

It’s also interesting to note the iPhone’s role in all of this. In an odd move for Apple, they’ve given us an excuse for being late – much like a tardy schoolboy – and that excuse is that they had to concentrate their developers on the iPhone. Firstly, I think this shows Apple’s commitment to the iPhone – they really want it to be a huge hit, so much so that almost everything else – Mac OS X, the iPod – is a lower priority.

Secondly, the it makes complete sense to pull Mac OS X engineers over to the iPhone, but only if the iPhone really is running something similar to Mac OS X. Also, you can take it as read that we’ve already had a sneak preview of the new interface in Leopard in the iPhone interface – think translucency, but most of all think animation; with the new CoreAnimation framework in Leopard you can bet that’s going to be the poster feature of the interface.

This delay is possibly the best thing that could have happened for 10.5 – well done Apple for having the balls to do it, instead of sticking to their original date a shipping something half-finished.