Apple's Tiger coming March 31, according to Amazon pre-order page

Amazon put up a product pre-order page for Tiger, Apple's OS X 10.4 operating system, and it shows a March 31, 2005 release date.  Price is the usual 129.95 like previous iterations of OSX.  As far as we know, this is the first time a release date has been associated with the new operating system (Apple had previously said only that it would be out in the first half of next year).  The date makes us wonder, though - March 31 is exactly the end of the first quarter of 2005, so chances are it's an educated guess by the Amazon people looking to line their wallets ahead of time.  The other interesting tidbit is that one would expect Apple to release new hardware with the new OS, at least that's how it's been done in the past.  As for what that may be, we'll just leave that cat in the bag for now and let the fanboys speculate.

[Peter Herndon @ Dec 19th 2005 2:10AM]

Booksellers and gamesellers routinely put up wild guesses as to release dates for highly anticipated products, in order to stimulate pre-orders. As more details emerge, they will update the release date. Entertainingly, they are occasionally not the first to know, resulting in a certain amount of backlash against the seller.

[Dave Furey @ Dec 19th 2005 2:10AM]

"...so chances are it�s an educated guess by the Amazon people looking to line their wallets ahead of time."

As I suspect you are aware, Amazon actualy doesn't charge your credit card until the product is actually shipped. So they don't make any money via pre-order, making your statement not exactly true.