Ah, the Mac audience. Sing hosannas and they adore you. Express a little criticism, however, and the bugs scurry out of the woodwork.
On email I received said I was totally off-base (actually, his phrasing was a little more colorful).
Another reader, instead of refuting the article, resorted to the shotgun approach. "When was the last time you came out with a world class operating system? Developing an OS is closer to art than science. How many software project[s] hit their deadline[s]?"
This was echoed by another reader who said I was making much ado about nothing, as according to my article Leopard was "only" 119 days late.
The delay...
The person who made the later comment likened the delay to a wife who tells you she will be ready for dinner by 7pm. "Of course, at 7:30 she comes downstairs looking lovely, and you are a little bit miffed, but hey, what can you do?"
But as I wrote, OS X Leopard's release was originally scheduled for the end of 2006 or early 2007. A year later, this was amended to "Spring 2007". And then to late October. And again as I pointed out, will probably only be here in "final" form in January.
So we're really talking about a delay of more than a year, not just a "mere" 119 days.
And this for a company that prided itself on meeting 12-18 month release cycles.
Which put together, is more like your wife promising to be ready at 7:00 and in fact appears at 7:00... a year later.
OS X Leopard shipped two and a half years after the release of Tiger.
I'm sorry, but being a year late on what was originally to be an 18-month deadline is more than just a little slippage in anyone's book.
Gutted...
Continuing, the same author wrote "One of the frustrating things with Vista was the huge list of awesome features which quietly and consistently got cut back."
Another put it more vividly. "Leopard's features were not gutted like Vista's."
But again, Apple did "cut back", only in their case the cutbacks weren't announced, but simply disappeared. Notable in this category was Time Machine being able to backup to AirPort Extreme-attached drives, an ability that one day quietly vanished from the AirPort's product page.
Another significant feature missing in action was resolution-independence.
Minor, perhaps. Unless, like many, you'd taken Apple at their word and bought an AirPort Extreme and drive with the express intention of doing wireless backups from your notebook.
Or if you'd bought a MacBook Pro with a high-resolution screen with the intention of "rezzing-up" the flyspeck-condensed fonts. While disappearing from view publicly, an internal development page Apple laid the blame on resolution-independence on third-party developers, implying that the ball was in their court.
Which is true, as far as it goes. But what if the feature had been working sooner and if Apple had done a better job of rolling out betas and final candidates? What if we'd had a longer testing cycle?
Perhaps then more developers could have done their part?
This is reinforced by the following Leopard incompatibility list on MacInTouch, which details problems with over a hundred programs, ranging from those that are "minor" and don't affect core functionality, to major problems that prevent use.
There's more to a software platform that just the OS.
Top Secret...
Further, in his keynote address Steve devoted an entire slide to the "secret features" that would be included in Leopard, but weren't going to be demonstrated at that time.
His reason? The idea that Microsoft would simply copy them wholesale and that they would then magically appear in Vista.
A joke? Perhaps. And another stone thrown. Besides, in actuality Microsoft was having enough trouble simply getting the features they'd announced into Vista, much less adding more.
Did they exist? And if so did Apple drop work on them to focus solely on the feature set they'd already promised and as such had to ship? Were they in fact "gutted"?
Your guess is as good as mine. But it will be interesting to see if Leopard gains any new spots in the coming months.
Minor, isolated, trivial, oh my...
The remainder of the comments posted here and on a few other sites boiled down to trivializing the issues, calling the problems "extremely isolated" or "a few isolated cases".
Which, in some cases, is probably true... as long as you're the one not experiencing them. And a quick glance at Apple's support site and discussion forums indicates that one might be able to find a better word than "isolated".
The point...
What was most surprising to me, however, was that no one argued the main premise of the story, in that the iPhone excuse was just that—an excuse.
A "secret" that everyone already knows.
So with that thought in mind, perhaps next time Apple can simply stand up and say with a straight face, "I'm sorry, but this stuff is complex, and we need just a little more time."
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