Jobs: Leopard Will Anchor Product Schedule For A Decade

In an interview with the New York Times, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that the Macintosh has a lot of momentum and the upcoming Mac OS 10.5 Leopard release will anchor a schedule of product upgrades that may continue as long as a decade.

"The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now," said Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in a telephone interview last week. "It is outpacing the industry."

Recent numbers from research firm Gartner back up Mr. Job's claim, indicating that Apple's U.S. 3Q 2007 market share rose to 8.1%.

Mr. Jobs also indicated that Apple's pace of OS releases will continue at a similar pace.

"I'm quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future," he said. "We've put out major releases on the average of one a year, and it's given us the ability to polish and polish and improve and improve."

In 2004, Apple had said that it was slowing down its development of the Mac OS because the current pace had not been sustainable (Apple had released Mac OS 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 between 2001 and 2004). Since then, Apple has released Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, and will be release 10.5 Leopard this Friday.

By comparison, Microsoft has only released two consumer OS's since 2001: XP and Vista. The New York Times references a rumor that the next Windows release, code-named Windows 7, may not come until 2010.