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MacNN | Apple's iPhone delays Leopard until October:

From Apple: "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.'

The company said that while it plans to have all Leopard features completed by early June, quality control would add a few more months to the development cycle.

'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,'"


I can understand how that could delay things, but they CLEARLY must have known this for months.

What vision pops to mind? Dana Carvey as the Church Lady saying "Isn't that conveeeEEEeenient?"

I'd been hearing that Leopard had LOTS of bugs as of a month or two ago and was behind schedule, and blaming it on the Popular New Thing About To Ship is a great bit of deferral - we're more willing to accept getting a better iPhone, sooner, than accept that Leopard is a huge complicated undertaking that was just buggy and late Just Because.

Interesting that Apple would choose to pull resources away from a $130 product with virtually zero manufacturing costs (R&D is expensive, but pressing discs is CHEAP!) that would be maximally distributable to their user base (everybody that has bought a capble-of-running-it Mac in the last few years) in order to finish a brand new product - Apple CLEARLY thinks there's more growth, and profit potential, in the consumer electronics space than there is in the software/computer space. And I can't say I can fault their logic.

Some were saying, when iPhone was announced, that it might steal resources (staff or dollars or both) from the Pro Apps group, where you have to hire expensive, specialty programmer teams to develop large, complex software for a relatively small group of potential users. What if you put such resources into building something less complicated but more widely applicable to the consuming public? It only makes sense for them to optimize resource allocation for optimal ROI.

So while my BS detector starts to tingle (think Spidey Sense of technology), using iPhone as a conveninent excuse to cover why it was already running late (regardless of how much staff was reallocated), it is a daunting concept to think of our professional tools (the OS in this case) languishing because Apple reallocated for consumer stuff.

As for Final Cut - two schools of thought on this one:

1.) They were already going to show now/ship later, so this isn't affecting them that much. The announcement of new OctoMacs with no new GPUs or high def optical drives the week before NAB reinforces that supposition, and hints that maybe we are in for a wait as I posited last week If Apple wants to seriously take on Avid for performance, they need to cut free of all that legacy code that has held them back or so long and optimize for the hardware platform of the present and future - the Intel platform. Apple hasn't sold a PowerPC professional Mac in quite some time now, so having software that does an extra bit of performance on the new hardware platform and requires the latest OS to do it is a gutsy move that, uh, would, um, require everybody to upgrade to new hardware/OS. While Apple has gotta love that idea, I just don't think it viable, and I'm pretty sure they don't either.

2.) It won't matter, because the new Final Cut Studio is about ready to roll - they've been working on this for a long time, the last major code effort was the port to Intel that happened last February or so, they've had LOTS of uninterrupted time to work on this. Apple won't be so radical so as to divorce a large segment of the OS and hardware Mac market in order to get a bit more performance out of the software by relying on a brand new OS. They've never done that before, and why change now. It has ALWAYS worked on the current OS, and maybe back a major version (sometimes, depending on OS release cycles), and works on current and one generation back machines. After writing that thing the other week, I don't THINK Apple would go that radical to get performance trophies at the expense of supporting the majority of the user base. While it'll probably run best on Intel Macs with latest OS, I'll betcha I get pretty good performance on my Quad Core G5 running 10.4.9 (I hope Hope HOPE so anyway). I'd get more, but not hugely, crushingly, real-world usefully more RT perfomrance an a 4 core Intel Mac Pro. And I have sneaking feeling that maybe they won't be ready to really make those 8 core Macs sing since the OS isn't truly optimized for it.

I've flipped some emails with Bruce Allen this afternoon, and editor web buddy who originally pointed out the announcement to me.

I'd said:

My bullshit detector is pinging a bit - if you steal folks for
iPhone, that shouldn't bump the release FIVE MONTHS!

Software ALWAYS lags hardware. Until you see benchmarks for shipping software/hardware you can personally lay your mitts on and afford, it can be a dicey proposiiton. Of course, I'm going to need to get into a beefy Intel Mac sooner rather than later with Redcine right around the corner...dammit. My only Intel Mac is my MacBook I'm typing on right now.

And Bruce responded:

Agreed, Mike, agreed!

It makes the 8-cores very scary to buy now - you can buy now, expecting performance to improve with Leopard... but by the time Leopard comes out, Apple might very well have released the NEXT 8-core models. This must be driving you nuts, my friend, since I think you are in the market to buy your next Mac, right?

The problem for everyone is, if you don't get an 8-core and independently benchmark RedCine on it,, who will?


...we'd have to wait on, and trust the results of, Rob & Graeme I'd bet. Fortunately, they are both honorable guys and share my utter loathing for what I consider "specsmanship." It has been said "...there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." The height of such endeavors I dub specsmanship, and with maximum pejorative emphasis.

Anyway, in summary:
-bummer that Leopard is delayed
-but I don't think/I hope that it won't affect next Final Cut's release
-if I haven't said it yet, the rumor of a high end, Avid tackling, 4K capable Final Cut Extreme never quite sat right with me, since Apple isn't in the ultra-niche high end business. Realtime codec/frame size mixing on a timeline? Yeah, LOTS of folks could use that daily. 4K finish? That is an ultra tiny minority of the market and doesn't make sense right now. But if they want to go nuts collaborating with Red (no idea what the working relationship really is between those two), I'm all for it, even it if isn't best use of their resources in the big picture (but GREAT for my needs!). Anyway, to announce a forthcoming package that would include the capabilities that Final Touch had, with the new asset management tools they acquired, and the next Shake, and say it'll ship "later this year" meaning next year, is the most plausible idea I've come across to scratch that Final Cut Extreme itch
-Oh, back on track - I'm kinda hoping new GPU & optical drive options would be announced on Sunday, but I'm not holding my breath - the timing would be so wacky.

-mike

Labels: Apple, FCP, Final Cut, iPhone, Leopard, OS X