iPhone at Mac OS X Leopard's Expense -- a risky strategy?

It worked out okay

Hmmm...Does anyone possibly think it was a bad idea to delay Leopard to get the iPhone to market? It seems like it worked out pretty well so far.

Windows Shadow Copy may

Windows Shadow Copy may indeed have all the capabilities of Time Machine, but according to M$'s web site, it is not available on the Home Basic and Home Premium additions. That means it not available to many of the people who will need it most, even though it is available to folks like Rob Oakes.

Very big mistake. As some

Very big mistake. As some said, chance to hit MS a big blow. Reminds of of "genius" Bob Welch at GE who pulled the plug one weekend on the ISP GEnie so the HR people could run an accounting application thus kicking GEnie's customers off line. GEnie was #3 at the time (behind Compuserv) and after that it was the death knell for GEnie. It could have been the AOL (before AOL went crazy with CDs and not buy high speed access). This decision lost GE billions of dollars and the same could be for apple.

I think it is likely that

I think it is likely that the delay will end up hurting Apple a great deal. Despite the noise of ourselves (the Mac Faithful), Vista is not all that far behind and may be ahead in some cases.

Let me share my experience as an example. I am the new owner (as of last week) the most expensive Apple Laptop on the market (a 17 inch Apple MacBook Pro). I bought it as an engineering and medical imagining workstation. I am mostly happy with the product... but not quite completely. I find myself going back to my other computer, a high end Dell installed with a Vista/Linux dual boot configuration slightly too often.

When compared to the Dell, the MacBook feels just slightly inferior from both a hardware and software perspective.

From a hardward perspective: even though the MacBook Pro is a very good machine it is not top of the line. The Dell features a 1900 by 1280 resolution screen (15.4 inches), 4 GB of RAM, and a 2.33 Ghz processor. While the MacBook Pro matches the processor, the screen resolution (despite being 17 inches) is inferior and it only comes with 3 GB of RAM. One other minor point that actually appeals to me a great deal, the Dell has the option of media bay which can accept either a secondary hard drive or a CD Rom. On the Mac, the CD/DVD drive is built in (and I rarely use it) which means I can't swap it out for a secondary hard drive. As I deal with large medical imaging datasets, this can become tedious as I must spend more time moving files to external hard drives once I am done with them.

Software wise: M$ may have blatantly copied many components of the Apple interface, but they did their homework well. I like using Vista and (I am about to commit Mac heresy) I actually like the M$ way of doing things more than Apple's (like the inability to cut and past files, GRRR). (Here is where I probably should be burned) For the moment, I actually think that Vista is a more visually appealig OS. The colors on my Dell are much more vibrant and the higher resolution of my monitor makes a substantial difference. While I appreciate that the masses do not have a $3,000 workstation to play with, this is at least partly due to the way in which the OS handles the GPU (I cannot make the same claim when utilizing Ubuntu [my Linux distro of choie]). After the end of a long day of looking at images, my eyes are less tired after using the Dell. That is something I could have NEVER said in the past about a computer running Windoze.

I also made another discovery, Time Machine is not debuting on the Mac first, but rather showed up in Vista. It's called Volume Shadow Copy and every unique feature that Time Machine claims (real time back-up, the ability to restore deleted or modified files, etc.) is all here. All it lacks is a jazzy UI (which I don't know how I feela about anyway).

After this rambling comparison, it is time to arrive at the point. When I utilize my MacBook, the small defects in the machine become what I focus on. Mac OS X is excellent, but it is beginning to show it's age. While the Mac is still a fantastic computer, it is not "light-years" ahead of Vista, and in some ways (thinking back-up and color), it actually feels behind.

Now given the delay of Leopard and liklihood (and hope) for a serious hardware refresh (an updated GPU and higher resolution screen please), I will not be purchasing any Macs until at least October. This is a shame as I will need several new $3,000 workstations in August for my lab operations. As a result, I will likely be purchasing from Dell or HP. And when I do, I will likely not be formatting the hard drive completely to do Linux only machines, but instead will set up a dual boot environment.

So, as my story is supposed to illustrate, the ideal time for a software/hardware refresh for Apple is now. While Vista is relatviely weak and unsupported, that is not likely to be the case six months from now. By that time Vista will have been in the market for 9 months and the hardware headaches of today will probably be solved (though I should add that

One last point: Leopard appears to be a minor update (so far). It's only must-have feature is Time-Machine. It is rather unfortunate to watch Jobs bill the other features as revolutionary ("Spaces," give me a break. Even XP had this via a PowerToy called Virtual Desktop Manager in 2003!). I sincrely hope that the "Top-Secret" features are very, very compelling or there might be a small backlash in the public eye. At present, Apple can literally do no wrong. There is enough kool-aid in the water to prevent much of anything, but as they begin to make the same mistakes that M$ has made, I am not sure how that will last. Vista has resulted in one evolution, I am no longer completely hostile towards Windoze. Further, by October, I will have given $10,000 to $12,000 to Dell/M$. If Apple had delivered (even in June/July), that would have not been the case.-

I'd like to see Leopard come

I'd like to see Leopard come out as soon, and as solid, as possible. However, Tiger is already better than Vista in many ways. Apple's recent history shows that expanding into new markets is beneficial, and I wish them well with the iPhone. And with Apple TV, while I'm at it. It's an exciting time for Apple and Apple customers. I'm a Mac software developer again having also done a bit of that in the days of the original 128k Mac. There were ups and downs after that machine came out, and undoubtedly there will be again, but things were exiting then and are even more so now. Contrast that with the situation Apple's main competitor is in, which I can characterize as major market share and minor expectations.