Leopard Release Date?

Hey everyone!

I need a little help here. Steve Jobs is very vague on the release date of the next OS from Apple. I found this site http://www.leopardreleasedate.com/ it has a countdown to the release date of Leopard OS. Is this correct? I can't wait for this release.

Is this site telling the truth?

THanks,
K. Walker

I don't think anyone knows exactly what date leopard will be released. I remember reading that it will be released sometime early 2007 (yeah, its very vague).

I doubt that site is telling the truth. If that site knows the release date, wouldn't I be able to find the release date using google?

Apple never announces release dates in advance. Probably Leopard will be released sometime around April.

I'm an ADC Select member. Leopard's got a lot of work. Thinking June.

What exactly needs work? The last demo looked polished, but then again, they only showed a select few things. Apple is known for making products stable at release, so it will probably take a little while, and get it out once it's truely up to par.

For one the Disk Utility and Sync'ing stuff is far from complete.

The podcast and teams server components are a bit bonkers still.

The Time Machine app and server are WAY off from complete.

The Alex voice is experiencing some "flux"... it's an on again, off again component on Server and some of the text to voice renderings seem to change from seed to seed.

(These are just observations from latest seeds)

So, while it's true they're coming on in big strides... unless there's a LOT of progress under the sheets already which we haven't seen (and I'm sure there is)... "There's lots of work left to do in Leopard"

Yea, well, being a key feature, they're gonna want to make time machine as stable and smooth as possible.

Actually, you guys might want to keep an eye out for it by the end of the month. That's the latest word on the street...

It would make sense, that way Apple can steal Vista's thunder by dropping the "Microsoft just caught up with OSX 10.4, Tiger, but now there's a new cat in own, Leopard, leaping years ahead of Windows once again."

I doubt it will come out this month. That saying, is really getting old, from Mac fanboys. Remember those desperate are those to lash out. I personally think Leopard has very little to offer, and I do think Windows Vista is still superior to OS X right now. (Remember, I still like/use both). I just wish Apple fanboy's (not saying you are one), would stop attacking Windows so much, Microsoft doesn't do it to Apple.

Steve, total fanboy here... a realistic one... but total and complete. Guilty as charged!

Apple's OS X is going to have LOTS to offer that Vista's not touching yet (a working iTunes 7.2 client for instance and ZFS for another, the other stuff is 'still under wraps' and uncle Steve's not one to share before he wants to).

Ah, I see we're gonna have to debate...

First, please let me lay out my one opinion on debates. I don't like to fight and argue, it's a waste of everyone's time and accomplishes nothing. What I like to do is debate both opinion and fact, in a civilized manner where no one gets offended or mad. While I may use tactics like sarcasm in my debate, please do not take it personally, as it's meant to re-enforce a point I've made.

I'm not sure what you mean by a working iTunes 7.2 client. That's Apple software. The fact that it's not working on Vista isn't Vista's fault, it's Apples fault for not writing a well designed cross platform application. iTunes is not a major upgrade anyway, because, besides for iPod functonality, I don't happen to think iTunes is anything special anyway. I'll take WMP over iTunes ANY day of the week. What they need to concentrate on, IMHO, is Quicktime. Despite many beautifully written programs in the OS, Quicktime is so very poorly written. Maybe it's due to its old roots that have just been tweaked and tweaked again. I would be really impressed if they rewrote a completely new program. (Even if it's called Quicktime 8 and looks the same)

ZFS is nice, but in current server situations, Windows still does the job. OS X and Windows are still both inferior to linux in terms of flexibility in this area. Windows has a severe speed advantage over OS X in the server area. (google around for this) Most pro level apps also have an advantage on Windows (such as Adobe, who's even admitted this). This is and it isn't Apple's fault. While it's ultimately their fault because they choose a BSD OS, and have left this, they can't fix the issue. What the issue is is that the mach kernel is just slower than many other kernels in these areas, especially server performance. The mach kernel system is really holding OS X back from flying, despite it's advanced API, the rest of darwin, and it's GUI. Not saying the NT kernel is perfect, but in performance, it's better than mach. However, to replace it would be another catastrophic transition. (There was word leopard was going to completely replace the mach kernel). Is it stable? Yes. As a matter of fact, it is a champion kernel for dual CPU, IMO, one of the best in managing multiple processing cores. Still doesn't make up the performance gap.

Still under wraps... There aren't that many new features, and whatever they are, just more eye candy to bog down your system and leave you with less open ram. (although when idle, i dont mind if the OS uses all of it). While windows is insecure by nature, it's new measures of security are very nice, and I think apple should take a note from this and implicate better security features on an OS that's already written very well for security. Jobs doesn't have too much more under the wraps, other than what core animation might be able to do. I still think, by sheer marketing, retailers, and manufacturing alone, the majority will still see the limelight on Windows Vista, because of it's userbase, that it's advertised more heavily by third parties, and when people see it, they'll give Windows another shot. (Remember, polls of most Xp users said they're content with Xp and had no intention of switching to mac) Apple's turnover numbers are still relatively small.

I'm glad to debate this with you, and I truely hope we can keep this to a civilized discussion. It's been fun to discuss this.

Sincerely,
Steve.

I wasn't saying that Vista just caught up with Tiger, or that Leopard will be superior to Vista (although I do believe that it will), I was merely saying that Apple will play it off in the way I pretended in that quote.

And my reasons for saying that Leopard will be superior to Vista:

1. Vista did play catch up to Tiger, which was waaay ahead of XP. Now I haven't seen or used Vista, so I can't compare which I think is better, but Microsoft was playing catch-up--I don't know how you could argue that they weren't: Vista took a lot of things from OSX such as its nice graphics, "gadgets" (which are pretty much a copy of widgets), and some of the security features, like typing in your password to install things.

2. Time Machine. Of the announced components that leopard will bring to the table (supposedly there are some surprises, but we can't debate based on those...) this will be by far the most revolutionary and useful. Yes you will need a HDD to back up on, but being able to visually scroll back in time in an organized fashion to retrieve deleted data will be a life saver for some people, and as far as I know, Vista has nothing like that.

However, I am completely willing to concede that Vista far outstrips Apple in terms of gaming. Windows always outdoes Apple in that field since there are very few games for Macs, and with DX10, Vista should usher in some nice new games. Now if Apple would just start putting some better graphics cards in their Macbook Pros, then we could all have sexy laptops that dual boot OSX and Vista, as well as play Crysis...