Subpixel: What do you people think hold out for leopard or just buy a mac now?
Depends on who you are, I think. "Consumers" won't be put off too much (students, surfers, Joe Sixpacks, etc.) "Prosumers" and straight-up Pros may well feel a need to wait. For instance, I consult for print shops. Printers are incredibly conservative with hardware, e.g. if it works, there's absolutely no need to change. This means that purchases are planned out well in advance.
Now, from what I've seen of it (nothing covered by NDAs, all stuff from dev mailing lists, etc.), Leopard is a giant step forward, internally. The addition of "garbage collection" in the dev framework is huge, and the new APIs are more than just incremental advances on existing APIs. I see more and more devs saying that once Leopard is solid, they're going to stop producing updates for older systems. I certainly expect Quaark to follow this path (given the requirements for QXP7), and I figure Adobe might follow suit to stay competitive. IOW, I think Leopard is going to be a must-have within a year of its release.
So when this delay comes along, it really throws me for a curve -- a budget is ready for June release, including 4 towers, 2 minis, 2 iMacs, and maybe a laptop or two. I am not going to fully load software onto new Tiger machines only to have to do it all over again with Leopard...a typical apps folder for me is >12GB, around 100 apps. Each machine needs color profiling, font organization, etc., and Migration Asst doesn't really help get it all done.
Not to mention the extra expense of replacing Tiger with Leopard! I would still go ahead and buy in June if Apple would let us know that, say, post-June purchasers got a free Leopard upgrade.
I really feel for my friends in higher ed...their budget year starts in June, and their PHBs are already telling them that money will be much tighter come late fall (not to mention that the time to install new hardware is in the summer, when very few students will be inconvenienced).
I don't like thinking this way, but I'm starting to fear that the iPhone is going to be another Newton (too much machine) or Cube (too much price), and that the tremendous resources going into it will be squandered. ::sigh::
FRISK291 --
1) Yes, it will have bugs...but it p'bly won't be seen as "buggy" -- network protocols will be twitchy, VNC clients will fail, and there will be several quirks thrown at high-end apps. Maybea few late bugs in the development tools/environment, and one or two bad kexts. But, 8 or 9 out of 10 wil be happy by 10.5.1
2) It'll ship in October....maybe with more bugs ;-)
3) There will never be no problems with an OS; there has never not been a problem with a ship date (<g>), but Apple's pride is on the line; I think it's gonna ship no matter what shape it's in.
S2