The New York Times has published an article on the upcoming release of Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 which will begin shipping this Friday at 6.00PM.
The article notes that the growing "halo" effect from the iPhone and iPod has caused the Mac market share to soar.
“The Macintosh has a lot of momentum now,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, in a telephone interview with the NY Times last week. “It is outpacing the industry.”
Apple is expected to move into third place behind HP and Dell on Monday after it announces it's Mac shipments during its quarterly conference call.
Jobs also indicated in the interview that Apple's Mac OS release schedule will remain relatively on course.
“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.”
Finally Jobs spoke about the iPhone and how he has been struck by the success of Apple's multi-touch interface which it has implemented in the iPhone.
“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.
There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.
“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.”