Apple has issued a statement that the iPhone will be released in June, but that the next version of OS X will be delayed:

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS¬Æ X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Since the iPhone has already passed some of its certification tests, one has to wonder if this announcement is subterfuge, distracting people from the four-month delay of Leopard with a tidbit of news about the iPhone.

Apple appears to be moving its focus from the Mac platform to platform-independent devices. At the recent MacWorld in January, Apple’s announcements were all platform-independent.