Leopard Mac upgrade outpaced by Adobe

ADOBE IS gearing up for party time next week when on Tuesday, 27 March it releases Creative Suite 3, but Apple's ‘Leopard' OS X upgrade is set to lag by a few months, suggests the Mac brigade.

Ars Technica - great name, by the way - suggests a June ship date is the most likely, judging by the state of beta code, various critical signals, the state of this morning's tea leaves and the word on the street from Johnny, the shoe-shine guy in Police Squad.

June makes a lot of sense in at least one way: Apple's WWDC devcon takes place under the powder-blue skies of beautiful San Francisco from the eleventh of that lovely month.

Taiwanese site Digitimes, however, reckons "industry sources" have told its hacks that Apple could wait until October to make its Boot Camp dual-boot utility work with Vista.

Anyhow, the significance of the Leopard wait goes beyond journalists bleating about vapourware. Apple stands to benefit from an upgrade-tastic triple-whammy of Adobe's CS3 release with native-Intel support, the latest Intel chips themselves and the new OS. A lot of folks are likely to wait for the final shoe to fall before buying new hardware.

Still, we're not going to let the threat to Apple's bottom line put us off attending the Adobe million-dollar bash. The company is beatified by journalists the world over as the leading tech purveyor of top-notch entertainment - especially since the old Traveling Software party at Comdex/Fall bit the dust.

Next week's UK gig is at a leading venue in London's swinging Soho. I'd tell you where but there's a non-transferable clause, it's really not your kind of thing and… well, you know how it is. µ