Speculation continues over Apple's Leopard launch delay
By Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 27 March 2007 03:14
That didn't make much sense to me, as enthusiasts have been running Vista via BootCamp for six months or so, even without Apple's support. There's no reason why it should take the company another seven months to get any remaining wrinkles out of the process. Remember, Boot Camp is relatively simple software: in essence, it partitions a Mac's hard drive to accommodate Windows as well as Mac OS X, and burns a CD containing Windows drivers for Mac peripherals. No rocket science there.
I'm inclined towards the rumours circulating that Leopard is getting close to completion. The bug list associated with recent developer releases is getting pretty skinny, and even when the necessary delay between finalisation and release is factored in, a (northern) Spring release still seems feasible. Sure, it might be June rather than March, but Spring's Spring.
Some reports, such as those covering recent comments by Shaw Wu of American Technology Research, focus on the idea that Apple has still to reveal the full feature set of 10.5 and would not release Leopard without at least one complete developer release - a point I made early this month that I still feel has credence.
But as I noted then, what if the secret features are stand-alone applications rather than operating system elements? As a hypothetical example, what if iTunes gained the ability to function with TV tuners? (A Mac with a built-in digital tuner would make a great 'one more thing' for Leopard's announcement.) Or perhaps Apple intends to make an updated iWork - complete with the long-rumoured spreadsheet - part of the Mac OS X package along with the iLife suite?
One suggestion from Wu that I don't buy is that Apple is going to include virtualisation technology to rival Parallels Desktop. Apple has been known to destroy the market for third-party software by including similar functionality in the operating system (and we all know another OS vendor that's done the same!), but officials have stated clearly that Boot Camp is Apple's answer to Windows on Mac hardware, leaving virtualisation to others.
