What does Apple’s Leopard delay mean to folks looking to use OS X as a platform to handle workflow for indie films? Fortunately, not all that much.

Of the announced features of Leopard, the only really significant one for our market is ZFS, for reasons I’ve discussed in the past. While it certainly would be great, though, it’s by no means necessary.

Leopard will also allow for GUI applications to be compiled 64-bit, which will have some benefit (though mostly from the fact that on Intel, it lets you use more registers). But we probably weren’t going to see major 64-bit apps (like, perhaps, the next versions of the Final Cut Studio apps) come out until fall anyway. Shake, incidentally, is already 64-bit. It gets around the limit on GUI applications in Tiger by rendering in a separate non-GUI process.

As far as the broad conclusions people are drawing from this announcement (and particularly the fact that Apple claims the delay is a result of reallocating resources to the iPhone), I honestly think they’re a bunch of nonsense. A short-term reallocation of resources doesn’t demonstrate a de-emphasis of the Mac platform, and ultimately Apple’s efforts in other markets will only benefit the Mac.

There’s a reason Microsoft tries to go after such markets; they believe if other platforms get a foothold there, it puts them in a stronger position to challenge Microsoft on the desktop. Apple understands this as well. The relationship between the Mac and Apple’s consumer devices is not one of competition, but of synergy. The “iPod halo effect” represents only the barest beginnings of this.

It’s also worth noting that Apple’s efforts in these consumer markets have direct applicability to our industry. Apple is one of the companies building the future of media distribution. Apple TV and the iPhone will probably end up being more important to content creators, long term, than Leopard. Some of the folks reading this blog are probably going to be selling HD movies via iTunes to Apple TV customers in a year or two.

And, frankly, it’s hard to believe this entire delay is really due to the iPhone; that might, to some extent, merely be a convenient excuse. Apple has been pretty good in recent years; the last big slip was when Mac OS X 10.0 slipped from September 2000 to March 2001. But software release dates slip all the time.

Is Apple neglecting its Mac-based pro customers? I doubt it. They’ve just started shipping the fastest Xeon workstations on the market; those quad 3 GHz chips apparently are in short supply, and other major OEMs don’t seem to be offering them yet. And they’re probably going to have some pretty cool stuff for us on Sunday.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 07:45 PM and is filed under Apple, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.