[gkefalas]

Right, I meant they're unusual for Big Fruit. And also, the period between this reveal and release this summer is equally unusual...

I'd say that the lag between announce & release is a little more worrisome and something that I wouldn't want to see become a trend at Apple. I've always felt that a big part of their press was their general tendency to release right at announcement of a product or soon thereafter. Though, now that I think about it, I guess their OS releases have, by necessity, had to have some lead time associated with them.

[gyardley]

Yep, OS releases have a lot of lead time vs. physical products.

OS X Lion was demoed on stage in October 2010, made available as a developer preview in February 2011, and launched to the public in July 2011.

[morisy]

The lag time surprised me, too, but if you're going to tell your app developers they can no longer sell directly to their customers without jumping through a few hoops, you definitely at least want to give them a long head's up. I'd bet the trend of early preview windows correlates very strongly with how much it impacts developing on OS X.