Bad news, folks. Leopard’s now delayed till October, and it’s all the iPhone’s fault. Turns out the iPhone “contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device”, so they’ve had to “borrow” a couple of engineers from the OS X team.

But, think about it, iPhone runs Mac OS X. Porting OS X to run on a mobile device is not the most confusing and convoluted thing in software engineering (trust me, there’s worse). Unless something else is causing the slowdown. Something so complex it requires thousands of engineers working tirelessly at it. So what can it be? Here’s a hint:

My money is on the secret features in Leopard. With rumors ranging from a brand new 3D user interface to multi-touch technology to virtualisation technology, it sure is starting to sound like a complex undertaking. My bet is that these features are causing more grief than the iPhone is.

Although this announcement slightly really annoys me and the millions who were waiting for Leopard, it comes as no surprise to me. Why? Because it’s no longer “Apple Computer Inc”, it’s just “Apple Inc”.

Is it worth gambling the Mac business for a new cellphone in a competitive market? It’s hard to tell right now, but I’d say it could go in either direction. Here’s the quote from Apple’s site.

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, 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 QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

I liked the way it was phrased. Yea, we’re working on the iPhone, it’s so great and awesome. Oh yea, by the way, we had to pluck a few engineers from the OS X team. Life is hard, boo hoo.