Longhorn? "We're years ahead" reckons Apple

With work on its latest OS, Tiger, wrapping up, Apple is permitting itself a dig or several at arch-rival Microsoft over its development record on the long-awaited Longhorn.

Speaking today at Apple Expo in Paris, corporate VP of marketing Phil Schiller, showed off the work-in-progress OS with a tour around its search feature, Spotlight, and some of the other 150-odd new additions that will appear in Tiger.

Apple has announced that Tiger is due to hit the shops in the first half of next year but needled Redmond over the constant delays that have plagued the prospective shipping date of Longhorn - recently Microsoft developers were moved from the OS to working on XP SP2, putting the delivery back even further.

"Microsoft's date [for shipping Longhorn] seems to keep changing - we just want to say how far ahead of Microsoft we are… we're years ahead of Longhorn," said Schiller.

Despite the unconcealed schadenfreude - "They're in turmoil over where they're going; there's no need to tease them over their problems" - Apple is doubtless hoping to win the search war over the war of words.

Spotlight is Apple's big move in the search scrap - "the next big revolution in commercial operating systems", according to Schiller - which is getting investors and acquisition-makers hot under the collar.

Spotlight works across apps and will search both content and metadata - even matching search terms to corresponding text in PDFs. It started life as a feature in iTunes - the little magnifying glass that appears in the top right-hand corner of the screen - but Apple has ramped up its capabilities for Tiger.

But for all the Gates-baiting, Apple was forced to admit that even they can't escape the Redmond orbit. "We have to fit into a Windows world - they're out there and they're all around us," Schiller added.