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Rumor: Mac OS X Leopard delayed to October?

Tom Krazit Former Staff writer, CNET News
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Google, as the most prominent company on the Internet defends its search juggernaut while expanding into nearly anything it thinks possible. He has previously written about Apple, the traditional PC industry, and chip companies. E-mail Tom.
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Tom Krazit

Digitimes is reporting that the next release of Mac OS X, code-named Leopard, will not ship until October of this year as Apple works to ensure compatibility with Windows Vista.

Sounds a little hard to believe, but the report says that with the inclusion of Boot Camp inside Leopard, Apple wants to make sure that Mac owners will be able to run Vista and Leopard on the same machine. Boot Camp, currently in beta, allows Mac users with Intel's chips to run Windows XP on their systems. Apple plans to include a final version of Boot Camp with Leopard.

Other popular Mac applications, such as iTunes, are still not fully compatible with Vista. And there have been problems reported with third-party drivers from companies like Nvidia that didn't work properly when confronted with Vista. But would Apple really delay the next release of its operating system to ensure compatibility with Vista, which is only being used by a fraction of PC users at present?

Apple has said it expects to ship Leopard this spring. Spring started this week, and ends just after Apple's wraps up in June.