iPhone: The reason Leopard is delayed until October

This is news to us! Apple Inc. (AAPL) just released a statement that their eagerly awaited update to Mac OS X is going to be delayed until October due to using software engineers to work on the eagerly awaited iPhone.

Apple Statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. 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 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 final 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. [Apr 12, 2007]

We at the iphone news blog believe that this was a smart move by Apple to utilize the best people to work on critical products when needed. Better late than full of bugs we say.