Bad news, Mac fans: Apple has announced that OS X Leopard has been delayed from its original release date of June until October. Well, I guess that finally puts an end to all of the early release speculation, eh? While the company had initially planned to launch the OS during WWDC in June, it apparently had to pull key engineers from the Leopard project in order to ensure a June launch for the iPhone (remember, Steve promised the iPhone in June but was completely mum on the subject of Leopard’s release date until now). “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(R) 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 in a statement. While the company still plans to show a “near final” version of Leopard at WWDC (at which time it will release a beta to developers), it won’t publicly release the OS until October, in order to complete the full quality-assurance and testing cycles.

So what to make of all this? While it’s reassuring to know that the company doesn’t plan to rush a buggy OS to market, this is still a big blow for companies who have based their purchasing decisions around the presumption that Leopard would be released at WWDC. This doesn’t just mean that there won’t be a new version of OS X until fall–it also means that there probably won’t be any new hardware until October as well. On the iPhone side of things, we now have confirmation from the company that it’s coming in “late June,” which means that all the rumormongers (including myself) were wrong. This iPhone thing sure had better be worth the wait.

For more on the announcement:
– see this Apple press release