Apple delays Leopard to October (UPDATE)

UPDATEx2 Hackint0sh has posted a few screenshots from the latest build.

UPDATE: Apple has seeded a new build to developers labeled "9A410", seed node points out many buggy and disabled features, reflecting the situation Apple acknowledged earlier today.

In a brief statement published earlier today, Apple announced that Mac OS X Leopard will be released with a delay of four months.

Developers may only expect a good beta of Leopard during WWDC 2007 which starts on June 11. The company had initially scheduled the release of Leopard that same day but will not be able to do so.

In an attempt cool down this pretty embarrassing situation, the company confirmed it will indeed release the iPhone in June as initially announced and pointed out that the efforts the iPhone's launch requires is part of the reasons why Leopard was delayed.

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.

Still, latest builds that were seeded to developers not only remain unstable and unfinished but also show evidence that Apple's promised super-secret features aren't even ready for beta-testing, unless they are so secret that Apple prefers testing them internally.

The most recent news about Leopard relate the possibility to set different size for the Finder's icons per item individually and some major revamping of QuickTime and Graphics APIs.

The delay of Leopard should have a negative impact on Mac sales for Q3 and Q4 as customers are waiting for Apple to release Leopard before upgrading their systems. We may hope that Apple has some great hardware updates in the pipeline so as to offset this delay.