It’s official: Leopard will ship this month--by a thin margin as usual.

Today Apple announced that Leopard will be available on Friday, October 26 at 6 PM, quoth their press release.

Leopard was initially scheduled to arrive in late 2006 or early 2007. In August 2006, Apple announced Leopard to ship in Spring 2007. Earlier this year, it was pushed back to October so that Apple engineers could focus on getting the iPhone out the door.

Apple advertises over 300 new features. Leopard will retail for the customary $129 US. Also, Mac OS X Server will ship on October 26 as well.

Get your fill at http://www.apple.com/macosx/!

Deep Thought’s Take: Naturally the Mac users on our staff are looking forward to Leopard, including myself. There doesn’t seem to be anything more in the way of big features listed on the Leopard site, so you won’t get much more information from that front on the new Leopard site. What is intriguing, however, are some of the smaller features. For example:

• DVD Player can now recognize scratches on a DVD and play back scratched discs without a problem. Sweet!
• iLife Media Browser now accessible via the Open dialog box.
• Disk utility now supports dynamic partition resizing.
• Leopard includes a handful of new fonts.
• Parental Controls includes a Wikipedia content filter.
• Preview now includes the Instant Alpha feature like PAges and KEynote.

See anything else intriguing? Leave a comment!

UPDATE: There seems to be a little controversy over the fact that Leopard’s price for education individuals has been raised to $116 US on Apple’s online store. If you are a college student, faculty, or staff member, check with your school’s on-campus computer store first. Since the campus computer stores are usually part of the university itself, they typically can resell Leopard to eligible individuals for the institutional price, which is still $69. These computer stores are sometimes separate from the campus bookstore, and you may need to show a valid student/faculty/staff ID to purchase from them. If this sounds like you, look for your school’s on-campus computer store and give them a call.