Cnet"s News.com is confirming a previous article from DigiTimes about the release of Leopard being delayed until October. Well, partially at least. Apple has announced the company is delaying the next release of Mac OS X, but not for the same reasons as DigiTimes" industry sources supposedly claimed. Because of the push to get the iPhone out by June, Apple was forced to pull engineers from the Leopard development effort and reassign them to the iPhone. As a result, Leopard won"t be finalized until later this year, and only a preview version will be available at Apple"s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
"While Leopard"s features will be complete by then (June) , 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," Apple said in a statement.