Wow, and we thought we were pessimistic about Mac OS X's release date! As most of you are aware, when the AtAT staff took the public beta out for a test drive a few months ago, we concluded that the operating system was unfinished enough to place our personal prediction for its 1.0 release sometime in May of 2001. At that, a clamorous hue and cry ballooned forth from the glass-half-full crowd, who (conveniently suppressing all memory of Mac OS X's already hideously late development) insisted that Apple would never set a release that late after the start of the new year. While only a few congenitally optimistic Mac fans insisted that Mac OS X 1.0 would be released at next week's Macworld Expo, most figured on an introduction in February. Or maybe March. May? We were almost boiled in oil for suggesting such a thing.

These days, you all know that the smart money is indeed on a late February release-- February 24th (Steve's birthday) has been mentioned more than a few times, and Macworld Expo Tokyo is slated to kick off on February 22nd. Even we, the morose doom-and-gloomers at AtAT, have since come around to the likelihood of a February ship date. Imagine our surprise, then, to discover that when it comes to predictions among "people who should know," we were actually walking on the sunny side of the street with our original blasphemous May guess. As faithful viewer Robert Fernando noted, when Macworld asked a team of nine Mac "experts" when they expected Apple to take the wraps off the finished version of Mac OS X, the responses were almost uniformly pessimistic.

Of the nine, fully four of the pundits agreed with our original projection of a ship date in May, coinciding with the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. Of the remaining five, one said March, one said "March-April," and three predicted release dates even later than May: two said July, and one went way out on a dark, depressing limb and actually pegged September, 2001 as the point at which Apple would finally get Mac OS X out the door. Of course, Mr. September-- Leo Laporte of TechTV-- not only admits that he's "ready to be surprised on this one," but also acknowledges that he's primarily a PC guy, so take his opinion how you will. Still, we're a little freaked out by not having the latest release date prediction out there. Nuts. We knew we should have said November...