OS X 'Lion' ships Wednesday, says Apple

Computerworld - Apple will launch its Lion operating system tomorrow, the company's chief financial officer said Tuesday.

Rumors floated nearly constantly during July that Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, would debut in the next few days or at most, the following week.

Those rumors are now moot.

"We are very excited to be launching Mac OS X Lion tomorrow," said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, during the early stages of a quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Oppenheimer did not name a time of day Wednesday for Lion's release.

Previously, Apple had said only that it would ship Lion during July, but had refused to state a specific date.

In an email urging developers to submit their programs to the Mac App Store last week, Apple said the upgrade would be available "soon."

Apple provided a "gold master" build of Lion -- the tag some developers use for software that has been completed and is ready to ship -- on July 1, but did not seed them with another version.

Lion requires a Mac with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 or Xeon processor; 2GB of memory; and Snow Leopard. Unlike previous OS upgrades, Lion will be available only via download from the Mac App Store.

Lion is priced at $29.99 and requires that users already have Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard installed.

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com.

Read more about Mac OS X in Computerworld's Mac OS X Topic Center.