So there we sat, checking our inbox every four seconds, hoping for word of a pirate webcast signal the way a condemned man waits for a call from the governor; alas, the pardon never came, and we were forced to sit out Steve Jobs's latest keynote while thousands of registered developers basked in his glory. And more's the pity, because we would love to have seen Steve work that reality-distortin' mojo as he broke the news of Mac OS X's delay. You've heard about this by now, of course-- at the very least, you may have noticed the sudden sharp drop in Apple's stock price following the news. Basically, it works like this: back in January, Steve promised us a full shrinkwrapped 1.0 release of Mac OS X this summer. That would give the "bleeding edge" power users several months to beat on the thing, shake out the inevitable bugs, and whine about rough edges so Apple could smooth them out. All the while, new Macs would continue to ship with Mac OS 9 preloaded-- until next January, at which point hopefully Mac OS X would have evolved into a fully newbie-friendly OS and Apple would ship it on every Mac.

Under the new plan, though, the Mac OS X beta (which everyone and your Aunt Betty was expecting at WWDC) won't surface until this summer, pushing the 1.0 release forward to January. If you've been following this story from the beginning, you've no doubt noticed that this is just one more in a long series of delays for Apple's next-generation operating system. First there was all that time wasted over Copland, and then Apple kept moving the finish line for Rhapsody. By the time the Mac OS X name was even first uttered in public, by our count the system was already at least a couple of years late. Now, the question that Steve had to answer was, given that previous schedule slippages had always been addressed by changing the product's name and feature set, would he be able to pull the scam one more time and get people to swallow it?

The answer, at least in our case, is a resounding "yes." Check out the brilliant piece of spin Uncle Steve gave us this time: Mac OS X is not late, despite its new ship date in January. All that Apple's done, he says, is change the names. What would have been this summer's 1.0 release has simply been recast as a "public beta," while the version that comes out in January will indeed ship immediately on all new Macs. So you see, the availability dates haven't changed at all; only the names have. In fact, the new schedule is even better, since non-developers like us can play with this summer's version as a free public beta (at least, we assume it'll be free, or available for a nominal charge on CD-- only Microsoft charges for betas, right?) instead of shelling out crazy ducats for a "1.0" version that was pretty much going to be a beta anyway. Dang, we really wanted to see him pull this one off live and in person...

Well, at least now we know why WWDC wasn't webcast: no multiprocessor G4 systems, no Apple PDA, and the last thing Apple would want to do is shout the news of its Mac OS X slippage from the rooftops (virtually speaking). But we console ourselves with the knowledge that at some point this summer, we'll get to take the Mac OS X beta out for what is sure to be a life-changing test drive. Unless, of course, at Macworld Expo Steve announces that the summer's beta has been renamed "gamma 1.0" and will ship in January, and "Mac OS X Really-We-Mean-It 1.0" will start shipping on all Macs starting in the summer of 2001.