With the upcoming release of the iPhone… Leopard OS was delayed. Mac says shipping should begin in October but that is well off the June mark they had originally set. Personally I’ve been extremely excited for Leopard. The clockback features have me intrigued and I hopefully will never accidentally delete my entire work folder and lose everything again. Apple reps stated:

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.

Basically iPhone is to blame but Apple assures customers the wait will be well worth it. I’m not so sure I buy the whole we needed Leopard developers to finish the iPhone bit. My guess is they ran into some serious bugs. As always though, Mac will release a well polished OS when the software is ready to perform and not before.