Like many people, I’m quite disappointed that Apple has delayed the release of Leopard until October. Many of the features that Apple is touting look really cool, and I want to use them! While major OS updates take time to get them right and we all want to see a stable release, it would seem that a company as large as Apple could get the resources to do such an upgrade in the time they promised. Apple’s “excuse” is that they’re working on the iPhone and resources have been shifted to it over Leopard.
I see a number of problems with the delay. First off, putting the iPhone over the core Mac OS X shows a disturbing shift towards a consumer electronics company that started with the iPod. There is a lot of money to be made in cellphones, but it is a cutthroat business. Second, Apple should be able to hire adequate resources to do two major products at once. Apple is quite picky about their hiring of engineers and for the most part requires engineers to be a) employees and b) must be onsite in Cupertino. Many of the most highly qualified Mac OS X developers don’t want to relocate to Cupertino (have you seen the housing prices lately or looked at the traffic?) and want to remain contractors for flexibility. In addition, Apple has very draconian policies about doing outside projects while being employees. While this may not be legal in California as long as projects are done on their own time and using their own resources, very few, if any, Apple employees that I know of are afraid to doing projects such as shareware with stymies outside of the box thinking.
Another problem is outside of Apple’s control is that many people that apply for jobs say they know Cocoa, but in reality there are a limited numbers of developers/engineers that have commercial Cocoa experience. Many people say they have Cocoa experience, but that is based on a few small shareware applications. I’ve been developing using Cocoa for about 4 years now full time and I’d like to think that I’m highly qualified. Granted it is a chicken and an egg situation that people can’t get Cocoa experience without a job doing Cocoa and can’t get a Cocoa job without known Cocoa, but if Apple put aside being employees and the location, I’m sure that, for the right amount of money, Apple could find qualified developers/engineers.
I hope that the Leopard delay products a solid OS release, but based on the large number of features that Apple has indicated will be in Leopard and the features that Apple hasn’t revealed, I’m not very hopefully that 10.5.0 will be stable. It took up until Mac OS X 10.4.9 to make 10.4 very stable.
Good luck, Apple!