Alas, it’s looking like Thursday as D-Day for Mac OS X Lion’s official digital-only rollout was a bad call by the Apple news gossip club. As of today, July 14th, 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time, Apple’s homepage is still pimping the company’s iCloud service, announced last month but not publicly available until sometime this fall. OS X Lion is, by comparison, still just a footnote at page bottom, “coming this July.”
So I’m thinking “not happening today,” or that maybe Apple’s planning a midnight launch to ease demand on its download servers. Not that it really needs to. Recall that for all Apple’s popularity, the company’s share of the U.S. laptop/desktop market is a trifling 11% (though to be fair, Apple’s laptop/desktop market share has been growing while the rest of the market’s contracted).
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Is anyone else annoyed with Apple’s last-minute-release, no-dating-game for OS X Lion? It’s almost like they’re updating an iPhone app instead of trotting out the eighth major iteration of their flagship operating system (incidentally, pronounced “oh-ess-ten,” not “oh-ess-ex”—they’ve been stuck at 10 for more than a decade). Those 250 new or changed features apparently don’t warrant any pre-game ballyhoo, just a “surprise, here they are!” whether you’re ready or not. Update your computer like your phone, that’s the implication, notwithstanding the part where it’s a 4GB+ download, and liable to upend the way you interface with your computer. I guess “no way to plan for” is just the latest bit of Cupertino “magical” rubric.
Now we’re hearing Lion may be available tomorrow, as in Friday, July 15th, because according to M.I.C. Gadget, Apple’s planning “overnight” store prep sessions, which purportedly preface major product rollouts. I trust that prediction as far as I can throw it (which, being a column of digitally ephemeral text, would be a feat indeed). But who knows.
Perhaps the delay—if that’s even what this is—has to do with the rumored new MacBook Airs and Mac Minis (new processors, Thunderbolt interface) possibly rolling out the door alongside OS X Lion. A new OS, new laptops and new desktops…it’d be a lot to juggle, for sure.
Or maybe it’s just Apple’s way of calling the media’s bluff, because bluffing’s as good as it gets when you’re quoting anonymous sources and collating the latest Apple-related rumors and innuendo.
MORE: OS X Lion Likely Out Next Week, New MacBook Airs to Follow?
Matt Peckham is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @mattpeckham or on Facebook. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.