News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

October 22, 2007

steve_jobs

Jobs: Leopard is just the beginning

Posted Oct. 22, ’07, 9:07 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Apple » Steve Jobs

Watch out, Steve!We haven’t even gotten Leopard on our computers yet, but Steven P. Jobs is looking ahead—to the future. Does he see hoverboards or flying cars? Probably not from Apple, but what he does see is the continuation of OS updates at more regular intervals.

Mr. Jobs said that Leopard would anchor a schedule of product upgrades that could continue for as long as a decade.

“I’m quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We’ve put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it’s given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve.”

The wait for Leopard has, of course, been the longest in the history of OS X, spanning almost exactly two and a half years. Does this mean we can expect to see 10.6 (Rusty-spotted cat) sometime between next October and April 2009? Sounds like it. Anyway, 10.5 is so passé—Steve Jobs, he’s already running 10.25, okay?


6 Comments

Anonymous said:

I'd like to see the 12-18 month schedule. I think the 30 months it took for 10.5 gave MS time to copy.

October 22, 2007 10:30 AM
Albert Solene Author Profile Page said:

Is he counting the Intel Tiger, here?

October 22, 2007 12:06 PM
Johnald126 Author Profile Page said:

As a fairly new Mac user (16 months) Leopard will be my first OS update. My only concern is that seems pretty frequent. But as long as the updates are actually significant and worthwhile I guess that is great news. I just wonder how many cats they have left...

October 22, 2007 1:44 PM
anonymous said:

I'm not so sure it's a good thing. A major system upgrade brings lots of new bugs and incompatibilities. I mean, even Tiger is due another bug fix update yet, over 2 years down the line, so how can you have a stable and bug-free system with all these massive changes every year?

October 22, 2007 1:46 PM
Andre Da Costa said:

The author in the New York Times post said that by the time Windows 7 arrives Apple will have released 2 versions of OS X. Its not a concrete confirmation of 10.6 already in planning since it could be 10.4 as well as 10.5. But, since Jobs himself said 10.5 is an opportunity to deliver faster upgrades in the future then it means that yeah, expected 10.6 by April 2009, but thats high expectations.

He was expecting to have Leopard here by early 2007 and Spring 2007 and Microsoft ended up coming out way before it in November 2006 with Vista and that has been a success with 60 million licenses sold since, probably way more since that last figure was announced.

October 22, 2007 4:32 PM
Dan said:

I'm a very new Mac user (6 months). The only comment I have regarding frequent upgrades is that I would hope they don't "break" other apps I may like and prefer to keep. All in all though, for the 6 months I've been using OS X, I haven't had any problems. My only complaint is with the school I'm currently attending which uses MS products for their learning environment (Visio, Project, Office in general), so I have to keep a Windows resource (thank you VMWare!). Other than that, I never even think about Windows or Microsoft products any more!

October 23, 2007 8:31 AM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: