Apple Can't Face The Truth

Instead of admitting that Leopard is taking far longer to finish than it anticipated, Apple has chosen an attempt to hide behind the iPhone to mask the hypocrisy of delaying the next version of Mac OS X.

PERSPECTIVE I can no doubt hear the snickers from Redmond this very minute after reading Apple's statement regarding its delay of Mac OS X "Leopard." This comes from a company that never passed up an attempt to bash Microsoft's incessant delays of Vista at every turn.

Now, Apple's a great company, don't get me wrong, but this attempt at getting around the truth smells of hypocrisy all around. As somebody in the office said today, "You can't bash Microsoft for being late to the party and then be tardy yourself." How true.

Apple claims that in order to finish the iPhone on time, it had to pull developers from the Mac OS X team. It goes on to say that the OS would be feature complete, but it would not be able to "deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us."

Okay, so we basically take a risk by delaying an already established product in favor of finishing a product on time that hasn't even been proven yet? Let us all remember that music phones in general have so far been flops.

We don't know for sure that Apple will succeed either -- even the world's biggest purveyor of music devices may not be immune to that as-of-yet insurmountable problem.

We do know from Microsoft OS launches that they also in turn boost PC sales. The profit margins on PCs are far higher than phones, so why would Apple take such a risk? It's beyond me, and probably a lot of other folks too.

Already, financial analysts are questioning the move. Barron's Eric Savitz said Thursday that he expected analysts to begin downgrading their estimates for the third quarter.

"There has been speculation that Leopard's release would generate both software upgrade revenue and an immediate charge to Mac sales," he wrote.

Apple's hypocrisy has been further exposed by sites like AppleInsider as well, which noted that many of the critical issues with Leopard still remain two months before the "end of the quarter," which was the Cupertino company's previous release target.

The company should have taken the chance to confirm the reports at that time, rather than lie about it and look like a hypocrite now.

What's wrong with admitting the truth, Steve? That's what I don't understand. If you think you were going to be able to sneak under the radar, I'd hate to tell you that the Microsoft fans would revel in your woes. They've been waiting for you to slip up for years.

The real gem from the statement came at the end: "Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones."

Well, it should be you hope this was the right one, because I'm not so sure it was.