The real dirt on OS X Leopard's release date

Now that the late March signpost has just about passed us by, it's about time to figure out when OS X 10.5 is really coming out. You'll recall that just about everyone on the Internet has been claiming, nay, insisting that the OS will ship earlier than anyone had expected. We've still heard nary a peep from Apple regarding the ship date however--what's more, they haven't even publicly shown a near-final build of the OS yet. So what's the deal? Ars Technica decided to get to the bottom of things by asking a bunch of real live Mac developers what they thought. "If they follow the same pattern as Tiger, Panther, and Jaguar, we should start getting a lot of seeds soon, and then they'll need the 3-4 weeks to start pressing CDs," said one of Ars's anonymous sources. "I'd say it's barely beta, not Final or Gold Master." So when can we expect to really see this thing? Developers seem to think that it'll be ready by June--just in time for WWDC, the launch of the iPhone and likely, new Mac hardware. Which really isn't early at all. So much for that rumor.

For more on Leopard's not quite imminent release:
- see this Ars Technica article