Traditionally none of Apple's upgrades were based on any type of strategy that factored MS' own plans for Windows. Tiger, as reported, however, will mark Apple's last release as part of their current year-over year major version bump.

Their release strategy has been extremely unfavourable to those in IT - trying to administer even a single machine with a critical role has been a pain in the ass when an update to a new major version is practically forced. The risk of introducing bugs and other problems being balanced against the availability of other fixes for usability and/or security - fixes that are often not re-built using the older code-base and therefore not ever released for older major versions. This has been seen numerous times when comparing 10.2.x to 10.1.x and more recently with 10.3.x and 10.2.x (Panther to Jaguar).

We have every build Apple ever makes at work. Tiger will definitely not be out this summer. I seem to recall this has also been reported on. A ballpark date might even be mentioned in the article about their new release schedules.

I don't expect the changes in Tiger to be as much of a departure from Panther as Longhorn is from XP. Longhorn is VERY different.

Bruno