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So on March 23 we hear that Leopard's coming in October rather than spring, to wait for Vista compatibility. Later that day, Apple's official response is that we don't respond to rumors. The same day, someone says that Apple says Leopard'll come out on time. Three weeks later Appple announces that Leopard is coming out in October, but the reason is iPhone, not Boot Camp. So there you go. Wait. Did somebody say they're delaying Leopard to wait for Vista compatibility?!?!

Taipei-based DigiTimes was first on the scene. On March 23, they cited "industry sources" who claimed that the reason why Leopard is slipping is "not due to software design problems with Leopard but instead is attributed to Apple's plan to have its new OS support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp."

So ZDNet asked Apple straight out for a comment that day, and got the very straight-out reply "We don't comment on rumors and we've made no announcements about Leopard availability more specific than Spring 2007."

Alas, nobody asked the obvious question: Delay Leopard for Vista on Boot Camp? Are you kidding? "We're keeping Leopard off the streets until we can support Vista" is a story that not even Jose Chung would buy.

(Please tell me you know who Jose Chung is. If not, follow that link, then check this one, too.)

Just when it seemed all was lost, up stepped our boy Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch Analyst Weblogs, with just the sanity we needed. He kept sniffing around the story, and firmly reports on the very same day, March 23: Just spoke with Apple who confirmed the reports are wrong and Leopard is still scheduled to ship in this spring as they previously announced. The rumor mill is wrong again.

Oops. Way to get it right, dude. The rumor mill is wrong, but so's your source.

Okay, back to actual news.

Anyway, once Apple announced the delay themselves on April 12, I like how very plainly they say that Leopard is running late, and they say plainly why: to ship iPhone on time, "we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team."

Actually, I love it. Crystal clear. No excuses, just an explanation of the way it is, and the steps they're taking to get it all done.

While Leopard's features will be complete by [the Worldwide Developer's Conference in early June], we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

Getting it right takes as long as it takes. Love it. I've had to help craft similar statements, and they're much harder to get right than they look. Apple gets, as always, maximum style points.

The trade-off also sounds about right to me. They'll have iPhone out on time, and a tardy OS won't delay the sale of a single OCTOMAC (hey, that's right! Apple has new CPUs out!!) C'mon, it's not like we're talking about a release as disruptive as Vista....or even System 7 and OS X.

For the record, I liked both of those releases...but don't try to tell me they weren't disruptive. Leopard'll be a walk in the park.

But my guess is that Apple will make more money from the first six months of iPhone sales than they might ever make from selling boxes of Leopard. The more I think about it, iPhone's sales in the first month will probably beat Leopard's total sales. I'm sure it'll sell plenty, but not iPhone plenty.

So my next guess is that this wasn't even a very long conversation around the ol' whiteboard...if it even got that far. No brainer.

PS. The address for you cats to send the iPhone? Right there on my business card. They'll sign for the delivery at the front desk. Thanks.

From Fake Steve Jobs, who remains the absolute best resource for Apple information, and by far the funniest blog on the web:

The nice folks at Sugarcat Cakes sent along this photo of their latest cake creation. They call it the Jesus Cake. Feeds a whole party of hungry geeks, but alas, you can't remove the battery.

You know that you can't remove and replace the iPhone battery yourself, right? Just like the iPod, you have to send it to Apple, and pay $79 plus $6.95 for shipping for them to ship it yourself.

On top of wiping off the fingerprints, they throw in erasing everything stored in your phone for free. Classy.

You're probably a couple hundred charge cycles away from need to replace the batter, but seriously, back your stuff up before you do.

I'm SURE I read that headline somewhere else, but I can't for the life of me remember where. Anyway, this is a very cool Google service that Nora pointed me to. They've just launched in beta form what I think is their very coolest search tool yet: Google Translate. As they say in their offical blog, Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). Or Russian. Or Chinese. Or Arabic.

This is so cool! As the authors of this blog entry (there are 3 of 'em) also note, although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English. We've been aware of this for some time at The COW, The numbers can shift quite a bit, but it's been a long time since we saw all English-language countries COMBINED equal more than about half of The COW's traffic. It's currently at about 54%, which is quite a remarkable testament to the "world" part of the COW's name.

Equally cool to me is how useful this is for English speakers who want to reach out a little.  I mentioned Russian, Chinese and Arabic above, because those are the examples you can find at the actual Google Translate page.

Again quoting Google's blog, While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access.

Yep, it's true. Take it for a spin and see for yourself.