iPhone blamed for Leopard's delay

In a statement today, Apple conceded that it will be unable to deliver its highly-anticipated release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard by June's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) as it had promised earlier. The cause? Key members of the Leopard team had to be pulled from their jobs developing the next version of OS X in order to help deliver iPhone on time.

"We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is," Apple 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 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.”

The other interesting bit of news that seems to have squeaked-by unnoticed in this statement is that it mentions that iPhone will be released in "late" June and not by WWDC as many had predicted.