McCracken's First Law of Contrarian Operating System Punditry—which I just named, but have long believed—states that it's good news when an OS is delayed. What rational computer user, after all, would prefer to buy and use a product when even its own developer doesn't think it's ready for prime time?

I've often expressed that sentiment when Microsoft's Windows ship dates have slip-slid away, so it's only consistent to cut Apple the same slack. I'm a little startled by the company's announcement that it's delaying Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" until October to wrap up work on the iPhone. But I'm OK with the decision—and even though I'm looking forward to getting Leopard for my MacBook, I'll happily bide my time until Apple thinks the OS is fully baked.

From everything we know about Leopard so far—and it's possible, or even likely, that we don't know everything—it looks to be a pleasant but reasonably minor update, with one known knockout new feature, the Time Machine continuous-backup system. (Which, incidentally, I could have used last month—I had a hard-drive crash on my Mac and lost some vacation photos that I hadn't safely preserved anywhere else.)

To me, the big news about the Leopard delay isn't the delay itself. It's the fact that it feels like one more piece of evidence that the Mac, which was Apple's flagship product for a couple of decades, may be suffering from a lack of full corporate attention in the era of the iPod, iPhone and Apple TV.

So far, it's been the quietest of years for the Mac platform. There have been plenty of rumors about cool new Macs, but no actual new systems (OK, one minor upgrade: the eight-core Mac Pro). The MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Mini lines, while all nifty in their own ways, are also pretty darn familiar; Apple's a company whose very DNA involves releasing noticeably new and different machines pretty frequently, and the time has surely come for a genuinely interesting new Mac or two. But you have to wonder whether Apple will release them as Tiger machines, or wait until they can ship with Leopard.

There were also rumors about an upgrade to iLife that was supposed to show up at Macworld Expo in January; the iPhone did, but iLife didn't. And now Leopard won't be a reality until fall.

Meanwhile, new iPods big and small have continued to appear, the Apple TV showed up, and the iPhone is apparently on schedule for its June debut. I was already sort of wondering whether Apple had taken its eye off the Mac ball, so to speak, to concentrate on other efforts; with the Leopard announcement, it's essentially admitted that it did so.