On the Leopard delay....

Me, I'm not overly perturbed. What Apple are doing is making sure they hit the "Just Works" target and they are going with an old strategy of Sun's, "All the wood behind one arrow", that arrow being OSX. The odds are that they are building all the OS's, AppleTV OSX, iPhone OSX, Leopard (and dare we say iPod OSX, I think we can) from the same source base and it's that which has diverted resources as they avoid the cul-de-sac approach of taking a branch of OSX, porting it to the phone and then spending the next few years running independent dev teams and trying to keep things in sync.

This "All the wood behind one arrow" does have the potential to pay back well for Leopard, especially if people want that funky sub notebook which really knows how to handle location independence and "On The Plane/Down the Tube" modes. And the experience of being tight and lean and mean for a phone is going to be good for the development team, who have been a little spoilt as Apple's hardware chaps have been giving them more performance in the last couple of years than they've had previously; the desire to burn performance for features is always high, and reigning that back in can pay back in a faster tighter slicker desktop OS.

And, what, boohoo, I have to keep running Tiger... It's not like I actually need an update, it's not like Tiger is collapsing under the weight of it's own patches. If I really want Java6, I can download it from Apple and run with it. And I can keep making backups as I always have done. The only people who are going to be groaning are the ISV's who've been romping through the Leopard APIs and deciding their next version will be Leopard only. They will have to rethink what they are going to do for the bulk of 2007, and probably roll out a new Tiger version of their applications in the interim. It's all down to development roadmaps in the end and roadmaps are aspirations with a timeline attached.

So, in summary, sky not falling, sun will come up tomorrow, and the only things that are certain are death and taxes; no one added "Leopard in June" to that short list.