Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Launch Delayed to October

Apple will not be able to release its Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. Instead, Apple will ship new OS in October, the company officially announced today.

Cupertino based computer maker says the Mac OS X 10.5 launch is delayed, because it had to borrow experts from its operating system team in order to finish software for iPhone on time.

“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,” Apple published.

Along with next generation 64-bit computing capability, which enables the use of more than 4GB of RAM, the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will include the new features such as an automatic back-up and restore software and so called “Spaces” to instantly switch between groups of applications, as well as improvements to Spotlight search and iChat. According to last year’s announcement of Leopard, the new Mac’s Dashboard will contain around 2,500 Widgets.