OS X and iPhone Development Aren’t Unrelated
8:25 pm, April 15th, 2007, Pete Mortensen
I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple’s much-analyzed decision to delay the release of Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5, until October. Ultimately, it’s not that big a deal. If you read between the lines, the diversion of software development resources to finish the iPhone could have long-term benefits for the platform.
As a refresher, here’s what Apple had to say for themselves:
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 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.
I have to agree. After all, many of the best innovations — or at least great new products, are created by mixing the DNA of one successful platform with another. OS X and the iPhone OS share a hell of a lot of code. Apple should have no trouble at all adding multi-touch support to Macs. I’m hoping to see the world’s greatest tablet laptop — and the first one worth owning — emerge from this delay in the first place.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting view of just why Apple fell behind in the first place, too. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, mac os x
Posted by Pete Mortensen in Apple | Comment on this article
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[...] la blogosfera maquera se ha puesto en marcha dando un sinfÃÂn de opiniones sobre Apple, las fechas, Leopard, el iPhone… Mientras, otros rien (por no llorar), otros siguen vendiendo iPhones por la red [...]
SomosMac - Yo soy un Mac ¿Y tú, qué eres? » PopurrÃÂ: Y con el iPhone ¿Qué pasa?, on April 18th, 2007 at 9:27 am
[...] the June arrival of the iPhone came at a cost. Apple had to delay the launch of its Leopard operating system by months in order to pull software developers off the Leopard team [...]
Cult of Mac » Blog Archive » How Much Did iPhone Development Hurt Leopard?, on December 11th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
[...] the June arrival of the iPhone came at a cost. Apple had to delay the launch of its Leopard operating system by months in order to pull software developers off the Leopard team [...]
How Much Did iPhone Development Hurt Leopard?, on December 11th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
[...] the June arrival of the iPhone came at a cost. Apple had to delay the launch of its Leopard operating system by months in order to pull software developers off the Leopard team [...]
Tech News » Blog Archive » How Much Did iPhone Development Hurt Leopard?, on December 12th, 2007 at 3:16 am