I've been thinking about the recent announcement from Apple regarding the delay.
<quote>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 Leopard's 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 f inal testing, and ship Leopard in October. 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.</quote>
To me, this does not make sense. If a piece of software is feature complete, it' does not take 4/5 months to squash bugs, not if your original release date was June, after over 2 years of development. 4 weeks, a month, these are typical Apple delay timeframes. They are not Microsoft, they utilise small focus'd dev teams, that occasionally slip but not due to the inefficiencies of a large beurocratic process.
My hypothesis is that Apple using iPhone as an excuse is smaller part of the overall reason. I've no doubt that something as sophisticated as the iPhone could suffer a lack of resources. However if they'd originally planned a June date for both and hadn't told the majority of the developers that were working on leopard about iPhone. As is apple's modus operandi, then either there's been an almighty cockup in the management of the iPhone project (unlikely) or something else, possibly 3rd party is also related to the pushed out release.
My theory is that if leopard is feature complete by June, then they are waiting delivery or favourable pricing on a piece of hardware. Now originally most thought leopard was closely tied to iPhone, i'm not so sure. Sure iPhone will be tightly bound to iTunes, which is effectively a seperate platform to Macos as it's development is divorced from operating system since we got simultaneous releases on Windows.
So what's out there on the rumor radar, that might be released by Oct?
Here's a few:
I'm not precluding products being released earlier, The iMac, due a refresh real soon now, may come in a nice refreshed case, Santa Rosa and a GPU update. I just mean that multitouch capabilities may be one of the secret features, Jobs mentioned last WWDC. In order to deliver that, particularly on a portable platform, they'll want a thin light, battery friendly format. One facilitated by flash memory. They'll also want touchscreens bigger than most out there and certainly multi-touch on a commercial scale.
Apple may be waiting for a price inflexion point in the Flash memory market. As many other analysts and bloggers have stated, Q4 is when they think laptops will start to ship with flash drives. Or Could be waiting on delivery of large scale multi-touch displays.
Imagine Steve Jobs, standing up and saying they weren't going to update their laptops til Oct (one of their most profitable markets) because they were waiting on flash memory to hit the right price point. Think of the aapl dip after that statement. Better to say mac os (~$200M revenues) might slip a few months. No point in delivering leopard without the sexy new hardware to take advantage of the hottest new feature.
Now you might think, if that's the case, the cat will be out of the bag in June (pun intended). But i think they can show off the features without really letting on that it's a hardware delay. There'll be a wink and a nod at the new features that imply updated hardware. But the perception it was all planned and not a detremental delay to their hardware business. Either that or they'll just show everything off but multi-touch, and try to keep it hidden til release day.
This is all very blue sky thinking on my part and i encourage others to come up with their own theories. Post them here. I just don't think we're getting the full story regarding the delay.
Phew, sorry about the massive post, had a couple of drafts, i just couldn't get it smaller.
M.
Note: If they don't have some deal worked out with Jeff Han, they should be in the process of buying his company "Perceptive Pixel".
<quote>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 Leopard's 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 f inal testing, and ship Leopard in October. 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.</quote>
To me, this does not make sense. If a piece of software is feature complete, it' does not take 4/5 months to squash bugs, not if your original release date was June, after over 2 years of development. 4 weeks, a month, these are typical Apple delay timeframes. They are not Microsoft, they utilise small focus'd dev teams, that occasionally slip but not due to the inefficiencies of a large beurocratic process.
My hypothesis is that Apple using iPhone as an excuse is smaller part of the overall reason. I've no doubt that something as sophisticated as the iPhone could suffer a lack of resources. However if they'd originally planned a June date for both and hadn't told the majority of the developers that were working on leopard about iPhone. As is apple's modus operandi, then either there's been an almighty cockup in the management of the iPhone project (unlikely) or something else, possibly 3rd party is also related to the pushed out release.
My theory is that if leopard is feature complete by June, then they are waiting delivery or favourable pricing on a piece of hardware. Now originally most thought leopard was closely tied to iPhone, i'm not so sure. Sure iPhone will be tightly bound to iTunes, which is effectively a seperate platform to Macos as it's development is divorced from operating system since we got simultaneous releases on Windows.
So what's out there on the rumor radar, that might be released by Oct?
Here's a few:
- Sub-notebook probably flash based
- Tablets, this rumor will never die, will it. More likely an enlarged iPod, or macbook with tablet mode.
- Touchscreen iMac
I'm not precluding products being released earlier, The iMac, due a refresh real soon now, may come in a nice refreshed case, Santa Rosa and a GPU update. I just mean that multitouch capabilities may be one of the secret features, Jobs mentioned last WWDC. In order to deliver that, particularly on a portable platform, they'll want a thin light, battery friendly format. One facilitated by flash memory. They'll also want touchscreens bigger than most out there and certainly multi-touch on a commercial scale.
Apple may be waiting for a price inflexion point in the Flash memory market. As many other analysts and bloggers have stated, Q4 is when they think laptops will start to ship with flash drives. Or Could be waiting on delivery of large scale multi-touch displays.
Imagine Steve Jobs, standing up and saying they weren't going to update their laptops til Oct (one of their most profitable markets) because they were waiting on flash memory to hit the right price point. Think of the aapl dip after that statement. Better to say mac os (~$200M revenues) might slip a few months. No point in delivering leopard without the sexy new hardware to take advantage of the hottest new feature.
Now you might think, if that's the case, the cat will be out of the bag in June (pun intended). But i think they can show off the features without really letting on that it's a hardware delay. There'll be a wink and a nod at the new features that imply updated hardware. But the perception it was all planned and not a detremental delay to their hardware business. Either that or they'll just show everything off but multi-touch, and try to keep it hidden til release day.
This is all very blue sky thinking on my part and i encourage others to come up with their own theories. Post them here. I just don't think we're getting the full story regarding the delay.
Phew, sorry about the massive post, had a couple of drafts, i just couldn't get it smaller.
M.
Note: If they don't have some deal worked out with Jeff Han, they should be in the process of buying his company "Perceptive Pixel".