Apple’s new version of the Mac OS X named Leopard which was targeted for early June has been delayed according to the company in order to focus its resources and efforts on the iPhone instead. The company announced on Thursday that they plan to “borrow some key software engineering and QA resources” from the Leopard OS team.

Apple does however plan to have some beta versions of the OS available in June at the Worldwide Developers Conference. The final release of Leopard has been delayed about 4 months and will now not be available until October. According to Jobs, Apple’s CEO, the new version will have a number of cool new features including a comprehensive backup system called the Time Machine and some “secret” stuff that would be shared closer to the production release.

This delay is a little surprising in itself, but even more so since Apple has been recently and publicly poking fun at Microsoft for the delays they had encountered in their own Vista OS. The NYT recently contacted Microsoft to get their take on the Leopard delay situation, in which Microsoft declined to comment.