Leopard not ready for April "Barely beta"

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2007-03-22 03:40pm

There have been a lot of rumors lately from "unconfirmed" sources about Leopard's expected ship date. For a while, everyone was sure it was going to ship mid-to-late March. Then mysteriously, the ship date (according to these anonymous sources) got shifted to mid-April—perhaps because we are already in late March. Oops.

Developers who work closely with Apple have been dying to tell the world how very, very wrong we all are. We have always maintained an air of skepticism regarding the early release speculations, but confirmation of these suspicions have been bombarding us lately. Our sources have told Ars that there is very little chance ("and that would be pushing it") for Leopard to ship in late April—that is, if Apple wants to ship with a halfway stable operating system.

Our sources say that, from past experience, Apple typically ramps up production in the last six weeks before shipping with "many seeds—like two a week." This constant seeding period continues for several weeks, and then is then typically followed by a sudden quiet period. Apple usually announces the ship date soon thereafter, and starts pressing CDs/DVDs (which in itself takes several weeks).

"If they follow the same pattern as Tiger, Panther, and Jaguar, we should start getting a lot of seeds soon, and then they'll need the 3-4 weeks to start pressing CDs," says one of our developer buds. "Which means, if they're really shooting for late April, next week is the last week before CD production starts."

Seems highly unlikely, given what we've been told from several sources about the instability of the current build.

Developers have not even entered into the constant seeding period. "We still have the same seed we got 2 weeks ago," we are told. "I'd say it's barely beta, not Final or Gold Master."

Is it possible that Apple is keeping some of its key developers in the dark by holding back a surprise, nearly-perfect build? Sure. Anything is possible. But seems like just about the worst idea ever if the company wants anyone's software to work when Leopard comes out. This is not super-insider information either, say our sources. "Anybody who has really worked with a Tiger or Panther seed will know the same stuff."

One more tip we got regarding Leopard, is that InputManager plugins are no longer allowed. That's right... no more "haxies" from anybody besides Apple. No more Apple menu hacks. No more Safari plugins. InputManager is not exactly the same as APE, but the two work together to load plugins based on which app is being launched at the time. "Apple isn't really broken up about it since InputManagers were often used for nefarious purposes anyway," our sources said, but the loss of InputManager control will break a lot of shareware and commercial software that currently makes use of that control.

So can we expect a Leopard release in late April, for rizzle? I'm certainly not, and according to our sources, you shouldn't either. "If what we have now is the final build, I am NOT buying Leopard," says one of our sources.

When do they personally theorize Leopard will actually be ready to ship? "June."

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-03-22 04:11pm

Is it possible that Apple is keeping some of its key developers in the dark by holding back a surprise, nearly-perfect build? Sure.

I wonder, however, if Apple IS doing something like this. Not holding back a perfect build, but Steve Jobs says there are some top-secret Leopard features that he didn't want anyone to know about so it wouldn't be copied, and no one using the Leopard builds has reported anything special other than what was announced.

Apple probably DOES have a special in-house build with these top-secret features.

Elessar · Post by **Elessar** » 2007-03-22 04:59pm

The lack of menu editing infuriates me. One of the more interesting benefits of OSX was the ability to modify contextual menus and have them actually run user-written scripts. Not to mention that variety of fixes to add older functionality like Windowshades, minization... *sigh*

As well, while Leopard is an excellent upgrade, it doesn't have any decent driving features... I suppose Spaces and better Mail / iChat might drive adoption, but ugh, Time Machine is so uninteresting.

RThurmont · Post by **RThurmont** » 2007-03-22 05:17pm

Memo to me: don't upgrade. Tiger is slow enough, I imagine Leopard will be a titanic flying turkey.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2007-03-22 11:03pm

RThurmont wrote:Memo to me: don't upgrade. Tiger is slow enough, I imagine Leopard will be a titanic flying turkey.

It would be the first release of Mac OS X to not run faster than its predecessor on the same hardware.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-03-23 01:03am

RThurmont wrote:Memo to me: don't upgrade. Tiger is slow enough, I imagine Leopard will be a titanic flying turkey.

So far, each Mac OS upgrade has run faster than the previous one.

Upgrading from Jaguar to Panther on my ol' G3 gave me a performance boost.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-03-23 12:22pm

Destructionator XIII wrote:Also, I think the new OS X is going to be offloading more of its UI to the GPU (like Vista already does), which should offer a speed boost, which may be significant.

Leopard is supposed to turn on QuartzGL by default.