Today Apple announced that because of allocating resources to the iPhone, they have had to delay Mac OS X Leopard to October. This really makes me mad, one because I’ve been holding out on a new laptop until Leopard ships pre-installed.

But what I really think is going on is that Apple is completely betraying the Mac, and is going to be spending all of its time on the iPod, and now the iPhone. How many major Mac announcements have we seen this year? Only the 8-core Mac Pro, and only really super-high-end businesses are going to have any use for that. It costs so much, and very few applications are going to honestly have enough processor load to honestly be able to fill up 8 cores. All the rest of us have had zero Mac announcements this year.

Even at Macworld, Steve Jobs didn’t talk about the Mac for more than 5 minutes? He spent over an hour on the iPhone, a product that wouldn’t even ship until June (and one which I think is WAAAAAAAAY overpriced, not to mention how stupid I think the idea is). There was no iLife announcement, no iWork announcement, no Mac OS X Leopard update, not even any kind of small Mac revision.

This makes me furious to find out that Apple took team members away from Mac OS X and put them to work on the iPhone. Mac OS X Tiger was released two years ago this month, and this new delay now results in us going two and a half years with no major OS update. (Anyone want to start looking out for Mac OS 10.4.10?) All of us Mac users are looking for something to slam into Vista’s face, and now we have to wait longer.

Furthermore, this delay is bad marketing. AppleInsider just recently posted survey results showing that about half of those surveyed are holding off on buying a Mac until after Leopard ships or until a hardware upgrade. It’s been 3 and a half months, and we haven’t even gotten so much as a rumor about timelines for either of these. And what about iLife/iWork? We have had no further rumors/suggestions about these since January, the latest rumor that was still holding up was that they might be bundled with the new Leopard. If they’re delaying that to October too, they’re out of their minds. The shiny new features that premiered in iLife ‘06 and iWork ‘06 now have a good layer of dust on them, and they sorely need to be updated.

The iPhone is a new product, and Apple would have had it certified even if they would have had to slightly delay it. It’s a new product and people expect that. The Mac is not a new product; Mac users represent Apple’s most loyal fan base. You won’t see a typical Mac user dissing Apple the way I see many kids at my school doing it while they’re listening to their iPods in their ears. Apple owes a lot of things to us Mac users, and they seem to be deserting us for a new, questionable market which I honestly think will go down in failure right along with the Newton and the G4 Cube.

Shame on you, Apple. Shame on you.