Leopard Delayed - It looks like it

Fresh news coming off the wire this afternoon that it looks like Leopard (the new Apple operating system) is going to be delayed until October. Original estimates were for "spring", which had been interpreted as the WWDC in June, but now it appears only a beta version will be available then, and the real deal will come out just before the Holidays.

I just hope this means that they've got a lot of very cool stuff in there - it seems a little weird for Apple to be late on an operating system, especially when they were giving Microsoft so much grief about Vista last year. I'm betting on no longer needing Boot Camp and Parallels - they've just built virtualization into the desktop - double click an app, and it just works, whether it's an OS X app, or a Windows app. But that's just me speculating.

Oh, just got the official reason - looks like they pulled some of the developers off Leopard to work on the iPhone - here's the full text

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. 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(R) 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, 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.