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I think it will be about a new iPhone and a new MacBook.  

If Snow Leopard is to compete with Windows 7, it needs to be much more than a bug fix.  They have something up their sleeve.

I agree totally that the tablet is a non-starter and best left to history.  It is not something that will catch on.

"If Snow Leopard is to compete with Windows 7, it needs to be much more than a bug fix.  They have something up their sleeve."

Are you sure that Apple would take the chance at being branded as liars for the second time in a row after the "secret new features" debacle of Leopard 1.0?

Well, you can be assured they'll come up with some ludicrous list of "new features," a.k.a. bug fixes by in large, that they can plaster in front of the masses to say how amazing their OS is. Still, the media will melt in their hands even if all Steve does is stand on stage and stare at the crowd, and we all know that to be true.

While the tablet PC hasn't caught on with consumers, year after year, the market has grown. You purchased the worst tablet on the market... which is unfortunate.

I recently read that 2007 sales were up 100% over last year and now represent 7% of mobile sales. Not sure how they came up with 7%, but the increase in sales seems to be indicative of a modicum of success and the fact that there are more manufacturers of the format now than ever before is indicative of success, not  failure. No, they're not yet mainstream, but they rock none the less.

I have to say the next roll out of Apple products have me about as excited as the next Preparation H product line.

Leopard and Vista don't compete.

After seeing the resurgence of Apple, I have learned not to underestimate the intelligence and vision of CEO Steve Jobs. As much as I am critical of him, I do have a profound sense of respect and praise for him. I actually look foward to three potential announcements.

1. 3G iPhone. Now if somehow Apple and Sprint could workout some sort of iPhone deal. AT&T of course has the first dibs. But if Apple could make something happen, a contract buy out or modification. That would make my day. Or if Apple would just quietly give away the sim un-lock code. ;)

2. iChat. - This is something that should have been done a long time ago. I am not opposed to Apple putting software into Windows users hands. As fragmented as the IM clients are, there's plenty of room for competition. A cross platform iChat would really give something that Windows users would embrace.

3. iTunes Store - I know this is highly unlikely but not impossible. If Apple would include a rip to DVD for television and movie downloads, that would be a nice coup for Apple. I found a cheap iPod to RCA connector which Apple sells for almost a hundred bucks. The able to use your downloaded movie on your terms would make Apple more of hero for content freedom advocates.

As for Snow-Leopard, I will wait till we have more information on it before weighing in. Right now I know more about Windows Seven than Snow-Leopard. However, i do feel MS isn't taking Leopard or Snow-Leopard lightly. I do expect as we move more forward with Seven, I expect more innovation and new features if MS is to maintain the crown.

@waethron

You just seem to make this stuff up as you go along.  10.6 is still at the rumour stage, so there can be no lies, just speculation.  Apple has announced nothing on it so far.

As for Leopard I subscribe to the 4 main Mac mags MacWorld, MacUser, MacFormat and iCreate and I don't remember reading anything about any promised 'secret features'.

Now Longhorn which begat Vista was something else.

@Avro

Gee, you subscribe to all those magazines and missed Steve Jobs keynote talking about the secret features he couldn't talk about?

Sounds more like selective amnesia.

Waethorn: Apple has never cared about lying or exaggerating. The Leopard "secret" features debacle has been completely forgotten by the iCabal and Apple followers. It's like a Jedi mind trick. Never happened.

Ocean: Of course Leopard and Vista compete, if only in the consumer market.

Avro: You're joking, right? See my comment above. Steve Jobs promised secret new features in Leopard and then never delivered them or mentioned them again.

Wow. :)

Leopard

300 future ??!!!

1)Crash

2)Crash

3)Crash

Cover Flow, Front Row, Safari CRASH!!

Reset Pram,

not work not work not work!!!!

App£€ it's only show buisness

etc etc

Leopard = Windows 95

Get a Vista sp1

It figures! I really couldn't give a rats ass about chatting, but need an Office suite. Oh well, Documents To Go comes to Blackberry this month. It mat be my Treo replacement. Thanks for the news. I'll start looking at the Blackberry.

@Waethorn + Paul,

Ah, yes.  The winsupersite definition of "lie/liar" rears it's disfigured face once again.  The Leopard secret features "debacle"... HA.  That's rich.  That "debacle" sure seems to be driving Mac sales at triple the rate of the market.  Some debacle.  Kind of like WinFS, is a debacle, right?  Or the developer apathy for WPF is a debacle, given that it's one of the three "pillars" of vista.  

Regardless, there WERE a bunch of new features demoed after that "secret" declaration.

Of course, some of Leopards "secret" features include the new finder with cover flow and quicklook.  The new dock with stacks.  Oh, and the system-wide help search that takes you to the menu item in real time (probably one of the best advances in UI discoverability I have seen in years).

Now, you can say these are trivial.  Fine.  But they are unique interface implementations in an area that is now defined by unique interface implementations: nature desktop operating systems.

To ignore these and that it therefore proves that Apple/Jobs are "liars" is so blatantly dishonest, it's funny.  The entirety of Vista's UI changes from XP fall into the same narrow range of UI tweaks and enhancements.  I'm really not sure what anyone was expecting.

To call out Apple on exaggeration in the face of an epic history of paper releases, outright lies and distortions from Microsoft throughout its history is just plain idiotic. Is Job hyperbolic?  Of course.  He's the chief salesman of his company.  OF COURSE he's going to say Apple products are "The Best in The World"(tm).  To expect otherwise is to apply some bizarro fantasy dork ethic to marketing.  It's a shame that the rest of the PC world's marketing sucks so bad that it barely makes any impact at all, while Apple's amazing advertising gets all the attention.  This is all just jealousy, coming from the likes of Waethorn.  Plain and simply.  "Why does apple get all the attention?" Boo hoo.

Jobs is more plain spoken and real than any of the MS drones that babble on with marketing double speak like "J" Allard and the rest.  Just thinking about his interview with Engadget after the Zune release makes my skin crawl.  "connected social experiences"  blah blah blah.  Show us the execution.  Show us functioning products.  Not strategy.  Not platforms of the future.

As for the rest of the snide stuff going on in this post... man, Paul, I just don't get you.  Your podcasts are SO much different in tone from this blog.  Dot Mac is overpriced, without question.  But how is it "ludicrous"?  It delivers most of the functionality you're talking about from "live mesh" (document syncing,  broad OS functionality syncing, cloud storage, etc) and has for years.  It's simply too expensive.  I'd love it to be free.  But it's not "ludicrous".  Leo Laporte loves .mac and so do I.  Whatever.

Pigeonholing anyone that disagrees with you into a "cabal".  That's ludicrous.

All the best though, Paul.  Nothing personal.

"The entirety of Vista's UI changes from XP fall into the same narrow range of UI tweaks and enhancements."

Umm... You do realize that....... Vista came out BEFORE Leopard don't you?

"Umm... You do realize that....... Vista came out BEFORE Leopard don't you?"

Not sure what that has to do with anything I posted.  I'm simply saying that given the maturity of Windows and OSX, the changes to the finder and desktop that Paul and Waethorn ignored in order to prove that Apple "lied" about secret features are comparable to the changes made to the UI in Vista.  That is, unique but incremental productivity boosts.  I said nothing of who came first or whatever.

Vista and Leopard dont compete.  You have to go way out of your way to choose Leopard, as in buy into the Apple world.

With Vista (as a consumer/joe user) you cant choose anything but Vista when getting a new PC.

As far as Leopard crashing??????????????????  Not once have even had a kernel panic with it.  I can say the same for my Vista PC.

Of course my install of Leopard was fresh OS install and on a intel Macbook.  I have read that some have had problems with over the top installs.  That tatic is never ideal on Windows or OS X.

@ Paul

I was in Afghanistan for much of 2006 and 2007 and really not much was made of them in the Mac publications, so I may have missed the 'secret features'.  All I expected in Leopard was a solid upgrade to Tiger and that is what I got.  I am sure that most Mac Users were expecting the same thing and happiness with Leopard seems pretty good.

weblogs.baltimoresun.com/.../leopard_gets_love_vista_gets_d.html

Leopard Love??

Leopard is only SHOW BUISNESS!!

@Snakedoctor1 I've never had Leopard crash in a Windows BSD, everything isn't moving, computer stalled kind-of way.

BUT I've had it stay in a black screen stance several times when I resume my macbook from sleep mode. Couldn't to nothing, had to restart.

Secret features mentioned (scroll down to 10:30):

www.engadget.com/.../live-from-wwdc-2006-steve-jobs-keynote

There. Yes, Mr. Jobs did mention "secret" features. Were there features announced after this keynote? Yes. Therefore, he didn't lie, even if the "secret features" turned out to be less than earth-shattering.

"Jedi Mind Trick" my ***.

Paul -

I'd rather be a member of the iCabal than the WinBitter crowd like you.

"Simplest" predictions?  More like unbalanced and incomplete predictions due to inherent biases.  Paul's bitterness and bias against apple runs so deep, he can't think straight about what's likely to be most important about WWDC - in order:

- Apps, apps, apps. - what will be news (and potentially shocking) is the breadth and depth and quality of the apps that will be shown.

- GSP - over at Wired, they are reporting that Popular Mechanics interviewed an executive at a portable GSP/navigation device maker who said he was scared ***less by the iphone with GPS.  Seriously, the screen is big enough and why not get your phone, iPod and Nav/GPS  in one device?  And no monthly rip-off fee like the GSP phones from Verizon.

- 3G Speed- I'm expecting apple to run some webpage loading benchmark comparisons to other 3G devices, showing how much faster the iPhone is.  It already was very competitive on EDGE (more than you might think).  Another prediction - now that the iPhone is faster, expect everyone in the press and blogosphere to drop speed as a point of comparison between the iPhone and the slower iPhone killers out there

- 3G cost - Paul likes to complain that EDGE is slow and overpriced, but in fact 3G has typically been very expensive and not seen much penetration outside of rich geeks and enterprise users not footing the bill.  As a consumer focused company, I don't think Apple will do this.  Maybe $20 month for EDGE and $25 for 3G?

- Worldwide iPhone rollout news - yes, there's been dribs and drabs but a lot is unofficial and we may not know everything yet.  Expect apple to put a big map of the world on the screen and show how the iPhone is now available to X percent of the world's population.  The only potential big missing piece is China - but we may see an announcement on that as well.

- Pricing - I'm expecting announcements from Apple regarding discounts/subsidies for signing up for a contract.  These will get the biggest attention from the general public.  

Possibles -

- video chat on the iPhone

- some kind of TV over 3G service

- another device - but I don't think so.  Apple has so much to announce and show, they don't really need to show anything else to wow.

@cesjr: Who are you kidding with EDGE? Bluetooth is practically faster than EDGE.

I don't know in the US but we have 3G networks for a good time now here in Romania and the rates have gone done making it accessible to virtually everyone. Starting from 5E for 3 days unlimited time but 8GB traffic or 9E for unlimited capped at 1mbps

It would also be nice if the iPhone had video out. You could use it to travel with some movies to view on a TV with composite input. Most camcorders include compatible cables that could be used, so that you do not need to buy it from Apple's store.

@DRWAM,

iPhone has had video out for a while now via Apple's composite or component cable adapters.  It works and looks great.  Being able to carry your demo reel on your phone and play it out via progressive component out is pretty awesome.

Just to demonstrate for Paul how insulting, generalizing and ludicrous his now-incessant "iCabal" label is... I'd like to quote John Gruber of Daring Fireball from his podcast "The Talk Show" regarding the iPhone's current price, its potential for massive sales (as in iPod-level sales) and the minds of normal people:

"If you're the sort of person that's waiting until the iphone costs $199...because you just don't want to pay more than 200 dollars for a cell phone.  which I think is the way normal people think.  i mean, you know...  the iPhone is clearly not going to become a smash hit until it can sell for two hundred dollars because normal people have the good common sense not to spend six hundred dollars on a cell phone like we did."

Wow.  John Gruber sure sounds exactly like Paul on this, doesn't he?  He's calling those of us that bought the iPhone at $600 and even $400 not normal, including himself.  He's even saying the iPod is not a smash hit.  Both are obviously true.  He's obviously an honest, reasonable person, which is why his blog is easily my #1 favorite.

And yet I know that Paul and Waethorn and the like consider Gruber to be part of the "iCabal".

Well, Paul.  One of the leading voices of the iCabal seems to be on the same page with you.  That kinda shatters the whole concept doesn't it?

Now, as for the Windows-hack equivolent of the iCabal?  I'd never resort to such a demeaning and insulting rhetorical approach myself.  I do know that there are some writers that are obvious and verifiable moron hacks when it comes to Apple.  Rob Enderle is at the very very top of the list.  I just call these people a more general and effective label:  

Ignorant Shills.

ps: if, however,  you were inclined to use a generalization, I nominate "MicroShill".  ;)

correction: he's even saying the IPHONE is not a smash hit.

Keynote over.  iPhone 3G with GPS for $199 in 70 countries.  

Game over.

Third party apps look nuts.  Games look close to the PSP in quality.

The litmus test for who's a hack will be those that complain "another event without mention of the mac."  Watch for it.