Apple delays operating system launch
Apple Inc. won’t ship its next-generation operating system in June as planned, saying Thursday that it had to divert resources from the project so that it could launch its highly anticipated iPhone on time.
The new shipment date for Mac OS X Leopard will be in October, the company said. The iPhone will make its debut in June as planned.
Apple shares dropped nearly 3% to $89.50 in extended-session trading after the announcement. Earlier, they had closed at $92.19, down 40 cents.
The “iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and [quality assurance] resources from our Mac OS X team,” Apple said in a statement.
Apple announced the iPhone -- a smart phone that also serves as an iPod music player and Internet device -- in January to much fanfare. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said Thursday that the iPhone was still on track to be shipped in late June and had passed several of the required certification tests.
Apple plans to release two versions of the iPhone, a $499 model with 4 gigabytes of memory and a $599, 8-gigabyte model. The device will be released in Europe later this year and in Asia next year, the company said.
“They had to make a choice, and one of them was going to slip,” said Jonathan Hoopes, an analyst with ThinkEquity Partners in New York who has a “buy” rating on Apple’s shares and doesn’t own any. “They made the right choice.”
With the iPhone, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is working to extend the company’s dominance of the digital media market into the larger mobile phone arena, which is expected to reach 1 billion devices next year.
The company said this month that it had sold 100 million iPods in the 5 1/2 years since Jobs unveiled the device, and it is the bestselling media player in the U.S.
Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008 to capture a 1% share of the mobile-phone market.
Apple promised to deliver a near-final version of Leopard at its developers’ conference June 11 in San Francisco. Attendees will be able to take home a test version of the software, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said.
“We think it’ll be worth the wait,” Apple said.
Sales of Leopard may reach $50 million to $75 million a quarter and add up to 5 cents to earnings per share, Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner said in a recent report. Gardner, based in San Francisco, has a “buy” rating on the shares and doesn’t own them.
The Associated Press and Bloomberg News were used in compiling this report.
