Blog FeedLeopard Delay - Hooray For Common Sense
I’m really looking forwards to getting my hands on Apple’s next release of their OS X operating system, 10.5 Leopard. While the full details of what will be included in this release have not been made public, the current Sneak Peak shows that for the developer there will be some very useful tools that should enable you to deliver more interesting applications, faster and with fewer bugs (there’s a few toys for the end-user as well). This morning, however, MacWorld is reporting that Leopard will be delayed from its announced Spring release to October. Given how useful I expect this release to be, to me this announcement should be depressing news.
UPDATE: Apple now makes this official on their own website.
Hooray!
It’s probably worth noting why I think this. Apple states that the reason why Leopard is being delayed is because Quality Assurance people have had to work on the upcoming iPhone rather than testing Leopard. From the recent beta releases of Leopard, however, this was already pretty evident since there did not appear to have been a substantial progression towards a finished product - bugs were still outstanding and it has been reported that the latest release actually has more than before. That’s not a good sign. While Apple has internal resources to test the operating system under development, and a closed hardware environment certainly makes this job easier since the number of hardware variations are minimal relative to the Windows PC world, the OS still needs to be tested in “the real-world” so that the bugs can be identified and resolved before release. Typically what you would expect to see is a list of bugs getting smaller and smaller until there are no known “show stopper” bugs for a couple of test releases prior to the real release. We haven’t seen any evidence yet that this is close to happening and June is less than 2-months away.
It should also be noted that Apple made a big thing about the “Top Secret” functions of this OS release that they would not tell the world about back in the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in August last year but we’ve still not seen them. With the OS, up until last night, supposedly still being released in June it was looking either increasingly unlikely that these features existed or that they weren’t really worth mentioning - because the alternative was substantial features that haven’t been fully tested yet. This potential is what had really been worrying me. The last thing that we need are “surprise” functions that haven’t been tested properly because such things have the potential to cause real problems. What I want more than anything else is a release of the OS with great developer tools that I can use on a day-to-day basis, from the time of release, without applications or the OS crashing on me. I didn’t have any issues with the 10.3 Panther release but 10.4 Tiger did generate a few OS crashes (a “kernel panic” in Mac-parlance) and I’d rather not see that happen again.
Some people are annoyed that the OS has been delayed for the iPhone, which has nothing to do with their computer and those of us outside the US won’t see for ages anyway, but I believe that this delay is necessary and expected based on the evidence available. I now await WWDC 2007 and a real introduction to all the features that will be delivered in Leopard with a subsequent progression to a bug-free (or as much as can be expected with complex software) release later in the year.
13th April | Reply
With all the Vista-bashing that occurred during the last keynote I watched, it would be terribly funny (for me, being a PC user, not you) if the Leopard release was plagued with countless problems like Vista was (and still sorta is) when it arrived. I actually have my copy of Vista ready to go (thankyou, MSDN) but I don’t think I’ll be touching it until Service Pack 1 is released.
I was also intrigued with the original announcement of more secret Leopard features to come, and the fact that nothing further has been revealed has been pretty disappointing.
13th April | Reply
This is by far and away the most disturbing aspect of Leopard’s development - the almost totally absent news about it. With the other OS releases Apple has typically provided a Sneak Peak page when the OS has been announced with more details being added to it later. However, all we’ve had has been the Sneak Peak page, information that has come from analysis of the betas and total silence from Apple on the subject. When MacWorld rolled around we were expecting at least some comment on the subject but all we got was non-Mac related stuff beyond the news that the iPhone would be running Leopard - something it seems it will be doing long before the computers do.
In fairness, as I wrote at the time, I don’t think that Apple gained anything at the WWDC announcement of Leopard last year from the Vista-bashing with “the funny Frenchman”. Apple doesn’t really, however, have the same excuses as Vista when it comes to bugs. As people point out, Apple’s environment is a closed one with fewer hardware variations and less software available so getting a good release out the door should be easier for them even with a smaller organisation. Regardless, I am much more confident now that Leopard will be right on Day 1 but I just wish that Apple had come clean about this a while back rather than sticking to the Spring release statement until almost the last minute. As a Public Relations exercise, no matter how they try to spin it, I don’t think that they’ve done a good job on this one and they’ve no doubt annoyed a lot of loyal users.
16th April | Reply
Apparently your common sense puts you in the minority amongst Apple fans. I think this is really bad PR considering the FUD tactics Apple used to Bash Vista because of its delays while promoting themselves as a more stable OS developer. Hopefully they’ll get it right but it’s sort of a mess with regards to the zealots at the moment who are screaming for a pound of flesh from the iPhone.
16th April | Reply
I, for one, am glad. I mean… I’ve been waiting eagerly, but the one thing that had me worried about Apple over the last five or so years was the string of not-ready-for-primetime products they rolled out. I’ve had three laptops in a row that came with design flaws.
Now I’m using a MacBook Pro, 2nd generation, and I love it. Not a single problem yet and fantastic performance. But I had to wait for it (after the first generation got over some major bugs).
So Leopard is delayed… it’s only four months not five years (like some other systems we know of… I’m looking at you, Vista). If it STILL comes out with bugs, then I’ll worry. But I’m confident it will also dazzle, just as expected and then some.
16th April | Reply
In Reply to #3:
In all honesty, I’m somewhat happy that the iPhone will get Leopard first. Given the issues that I had with early versions of Tiger I’m quite happy for someone else to test the OS first so that bugs can be knocked out before the Mac-version of it is released. Yeah, there will no doubt be application specific bugs still existing since the iPhone isn’t a Mac but at least the kernel should have been well exercised by the time October comes around and that in itself may help.
I should also note that the Apple community has been highly embarrassing of late with wacko predictions of early releases of Leopard (March, April and May had all been mooted) and now they’re crying because the obvious has happened. A 4-month delay for something that was obviously going to happen since MacWorld? Get over it.