iPad rumor: A new os for the iPad is called Clouded Leopard
Apple has a well-known practice of nicknaming versions of its Mac OS X after big cats, such as cheetah, puma, jaguar, panther, tiger, leopard and snow leopard. (Perhaps wisely, given other definitions, Apple has not gone with “cougar” yet, or ever.) Many technophiles read whatever tea leaves they could to portend what operating system the ‘tweener’ iPad may use, whether from the bigger Mac or from the smaller iPhone (the latter, as it turns out). Despite what people heard on the grapevine, Apple did not create its latest feline-monikered OS for the iPad, so “clouded leopard” it is not. All roads lead to the source of this specious bit of drivel being an article on phoneArena.com claiming to have received “internal Apple documents” from an “anonymous tipster.” The blogosphere roundly rejected the documents as fakes, but entertaining ones at that, complete with a watermark and likely fabricated by a geek to titillate other geeks until the real iPad specs came out. Among other details in the leaked memo: That the tablet would be called the iSlate and have an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz processor (wrong on both counts). For the record, the clouded leopard is a real animal and might indeed be an attractive option for Apple at some point as so-called cloud computing really takes off.
