Apple said today that the iPhone is still on track to be released in June, but that it will delay Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard until October. The next version of Apple’s powerful operating system was scheduled to be released this spring. Apple blamed the delay on the iPhone, saying it had to “borrow” key resources from its Mac OS X team to complete the device on time. As previously noted on several occasions, the iPhone runs a stripped-down version of the Mac operating system.
“iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned,” Apple said in a statement. “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,” Apple continued, “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.”