Apple's Tiger delayed at Amazon

Apple is cutting it fine to make good on its boast that the latest version of its Mac OS, Tiger, will ship in the first half of next year.

Amazon.com has now changed the date from which it expects to ship Tiger: initially when taking pre-orders, the e-tailer gave a release date of 31 March 2005. That's now slipped to 30 June.

Amazon's UK arm is not taking pre-orders for the operating software and Apple maintains no release date has been set.

While technically filling Apple's promise of releasing Tiger into the world in the first half of 2005, Mac fans will doubtless be disappointed at the wait, especially since a preview release, which Apple's Ken Bereskin, senior director of Mac OS 10, called "a solid copy", has been out since this June.

Nevertheless, Cupertino has yet to rack up the catalogue of delays which have dogged Microsoft's Longhorn release date.

Despite leaving one day of grace between the promised and actual release date for Tiger, execs at the recent Apple Expo repeatedly said the OS's punctuality would put Redmond's to shame.

Corporate VP of marketing Phil Schiller said: "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."