Blame the Phone

Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is being pushed from spring to October. Developers were pulled off the project to finish the iPhone. The community responded with the kind of disappointment you get when someone breaks a promise and then explains, quite calmly and reasonably, exactly why—which somehow makes it worse.

For me it’s a genuine nuisance. I’d been planning to use the Leopard release as a forcing function to wipe my Mac mini clean—kill the accumulated junk of years, start fresh. That plan now lives in October, and I’m not sure I want to wait that long. Maybe I just reinstall Tiger now and deal with the upgrade when it eventually ships. There’s something almost appealing about a clean machine for its own sake, independent of whatever OS version sits on it.

The bigger frustration is the direction it signals. Apple just dropped "Computer" from its company name. Now it’s routing engineering talent away from the Mac toward the phone. You can see clearly which way the priorities are tilted. Mac fans online console themselves by noting that Tiger still beats Vista, which is true but feels less like confidence and more like coping. When WWDC rolls around in June and the new Leopard features get their first public showing, it’ll be the company dangling something shiny to keep the faithful patient. Which will probably work, because it always does.