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Apple Statement

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. [Apr 12, 2007]

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Originally posted by thalo:
[roll]eye[/roll]

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They can not finish a gizmo, release it semi-operational, and when they fix the bugs, release it again and get everyone to rebuy it. Because computers are more of an investment, they aren't as disposable. Apple has done everything in their power to MAKE them disposable, but so far haven't stumbled on the magic it takes to make digikids buy new systems every year, the way they do iPods. Or the way they will for phones.

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Originally posted by BN:
(but I still would not consider things such as the iPod easy).

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That's only because you don't know how it's done. Basically, you buy the chip from here , here or here , or a number of other manufacturers. You write or hire someone to write firmware for it. Oftentimes the chip manufacturers have firmware that will work perfectly fine with little or no changes. You add a slick case, a battery, an LCD display, a button or two for controls, and an earphone jack and you have yourself a MP3 player. Sometimes you need to add a RAM chip and sometimes the MP3 chip has enough of its own onboard RAM. It's not difficult engineering. Pretty simple. Apple isn't pushing the frontiers of engineering. All the inventiveness contained in this product is in the marketing.

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Will Classic still be on the System disk that comes with the computer?

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Apple's Leopard delay may signal deeper problems

By Troy Wolverton
Mercury News
Article Launched: 04/12/2007 02:46:56 PM PDT

Apple's ambition may be starting to get ahead of the company's ability to achieve it.

Renowned in recent years for its operational excellence, Apple in the last two months has delayed two high-profile products, the Apple TV set-top box and now, it said Thursday, Leopard, the upcoming update to its OS X operating system. The company pushed back the release date of Leopard so it wouldn't have to delay an even more highly anticipated product, the iPhone.

The problem Apple is running into is that it's a relatively small company compared to tech giants such as Hewlett-Packard or IBM, said Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner. As of last fall, Apple had about 18,000 full-time employees, compared to 156,000 for H-P, according to the companies' annual reports.

"Clearly there's evidence that they're not executing to the same level they have in the past," said Baker.

While Apple hasn't been known for such delays, they're not surprising, Baker said, noting that Apple is "broadening their product offering, and they have only so many engineering resources to go around."

Apple said on Thursday that it was delaying Leopard, the fifth update of its OS X operating system, because it had to pull some of its engineering and quality assurance personnel from that project to help out with the iPhone. The much-hyped device, which Apple plans to release in June, will contain a new, slimmed-down version of the OS X operating system, which powers Apple's Macintosh computers.

The move follows the delay in shipping Apple TV. ...

By delaying Leopard in favor of the iPhone, Apple is obviously showing which product it thinks is more important. Given the hype around the iPhone and its potential, that's not surprising. But it likely won't come without a cost, a fact Apple acknowledged in its statement.

"Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones," the company said.

But by shifting resources to the iPhone away from Leopard, the company is favoring an unproven product that will compete in a very challenging industry, notes Richard Shim, an analyst with IDC, a market research firm.

The delay - and the reason behind it - are "a risk and a sign of how Apple is changing and diversifying," said Shim. "It's also a sign that they'll have to be more careful with spreading themselves too thin."

When Apple released Tiger, the last version of its operating system, two years ago, the program helped boost the company's overall software sales by more than 50 percent. Analysts have been expecting similar results with Leopard, which promises a number of new features, including a new backup program called Time Machine and advanced 3-D animation features.

Now Apple will have to wait several months for those sales, which will now come after the end of its fiscal year in September. That could lead analysts to lower their sales and earnings estimates for the company this year - and potentially lead to a lower stock price.

Indeed, in after-hours trading following Apple's announcement of the Leopard delay, the company's stock fell $1.94, or 2.1 percent, to $90.25.

But the delay could have a wider effect for Apple, potentially hurting near-term sales of its Macintosh computers during the important back-to-school season.

Perhaps more importantly, the delay gives archrival Microsoft extra time to convince computer shoppers debating between the two that its new Windows Vista operating system is every bit as good as OS X.

...

The delay in Leopard and the earlier delay with Apple TV may serve as a reality check for investors and analysts who have been expecting big things from Apple. Indeed, many have been salivating at the thought that the iPhone or Apple TV may become as big a hit as the company's iPods.

In recent years, investors have had little reason to fear that the success of those products might be affected by Apple's own operational problems.

Last year, for instance, the company rolled out its first-ever computers based on Intel's processors some five months before it had promised them. And the company has updated its iPod lineup regularly, adding new models and completely revamping older ones.

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although completely breaking Classic wasn't the reason for moving to Intel (and a lot of people are scratching their heads for reason why they did)

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Originally posted by HighHopes:

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Originally posted by BN:
(but I still would not consider things such as the iPod easy).

That's only because you don't know how it's done. Basically, you buy the chip from here , here or here , or a number of other manufacturers. You write or hire someone to write firmware for it. Oftentimes the chip manufacturers have firmware that will work perfectly fine with little or no changes. You add a slick case, a battery, an LCD display, a button or two for controls, and an earphone jack and you have yourself a MP3 player. Sometimes you need to add a RAM chip and sometimes the MP3 chip has enough of its own onboard RAM. It's not difficult engineering. Pretty simple. Apple isn't pushing the frontiers of engineering. All the inventiveness contained in this product is in the marketing.

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mp3-players today are - technically - easy. Any small taiwanese outfit can build you one in no time at all. Mobile phones, on the other hand, are different beasts. Especially if you want to do other things than phoning with 'em.

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Mobile phones are so ubiquitous these days, why doesn't the same argument hold for them? You can go to manufacturer A, B, and C and get the parts you need.

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Then all you need to do is have someone write a clever little interface for some other gadgets, and bingo – the iPhone.

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Hey, I’m not saying that building an iPod or iPhone are like sending men to the moon. But don't write-off marketing, interface, and product design as if these weren't achievements as well. Good marketing is hard. Good design is hard (or requires rare talent – maybe for Ives it comes easy). And we know that good interface is very hard indeed. And like anything, once someone has done something successfully (like a magician showing you his tricks), it then seems so utterly easy and obvious. Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm like the world's greatest Jobs basher. But I don't see any reason to denigrate the achievements behind the iPod. Granted, point taken that indeed you don't have to invent its constituent parts from scratch. You can go to manufacturer A, B, and C for the parts. But you can say that about anything these days. Going to space is easy. You just go to Morton Thiokol for the boosters, Cape Canaveral for the launching facilities, bingo. You're in space.