Apple gets the iPhone ready for late June, but Leopard will wait

Good news (and maybe some bad news) for everyone waiting for the long desired Apple iPhone. It appears as if Apple is pretty excited for customers to actually get and use this phone, however the “schedule to ship in late June as planned” may raise some eyebrows. This may go against the “confirmed” June 11th release that we have heard about. Of course this may just be us reading into what late June really means. Additionally, the complexity of the iPhone project has caused Apple’s next generation operating system, OS X Leopard, to get pushed back from this summer to October.

Apple released the following statement today:

The 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.

Apple of course is positive about the situation but some may get concerned that they have ran into problems on the iPhone as well as issues with Leopard. It is not like Apple to push back dates … unless they are adding even more functionality or plan to launch new notebooks/desktops along with Leopard that are optimized for the OS (unlike PC’s currently being sold with Vista but tend to lack the true power needed).