So the rumors were right. Apple has delayed the launch of Leopard, its next-generation Mac OS X, a competitor of Microsoft Windows, until October, four months past its June 11 due date.

In a statement issued late Thursday after the market closed Apple blamed it on the iPhone.

Engineering resources were tight, it said, and it had to move them to the iPhone to get that out in June as planned.

According to Apple, "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."

"Life often presents tradeoffs," it added, "and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones."