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.