An Apple press release issued early Thursday afternoon says:

"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."

Our take: This is bad news on a number of levels.

> Apple's momentum will slow. Apple is on a roll right now - iPods passing the 100,000,000-sales mark, the iPhone on the horizon, swtichers switching - but missing such an important, highly visible deadline will most certainly give both investors and consumers pause. Comparisons to Microsoft Vista's painful, oft-delayed release won't be fair, but they will be made.

> Mac sales will slip. There's a tremendous amount of people who have been waiting for Leopard (and its companion iLife/iWork suites) before they'll buy their next Mac. Will they continue to wait until October? We think yes - unless Apple has the foresight to start bundling a coupon with new systems that entitles the bearer to a free copy of Leopard/iLife/iWork when it finally does ship.

> The rest of the Mac ecosystem will suffer. Third-party developers - especially those whose planned products rely on such Leopard features as Core Animation - will now have to wait until October for the resurces that they invested in Leopard-supported development to fire up their revenue streams. This can't be good.

What's your opinion of this delay? How will it affect you? Let the world know in Comments, below.