Apple's Jobs/Schiller Special Keynote at Seybold SF Today at Noon ET

is expected to include an announcement and demonstration of Mac OS X 10.1. Hopefully, their keynote will announce when and how Mac OS X 10.1 will be made available. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs was supposed to be at the Apple Expo in Paris and appear at Seybold by satellite but the Expo was canceled so perhaps Steve Jobs will show up in person along with the Apple VP for Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller.

We know that v10.1 will have a much faster Finder as demonstrated by Steve Jobs at Macworld NYC in July, CD burning in the Finder, DVD Playback for those Macs with a DVD drive and software DVD decoding and Mac OS X native drivers for the Nvidia GeForce3 graphics card. From messages on various listservers, significant improvements are also expected in Mac OS X Mail, the email client included free with Mac OS X.

Free upgrade CDs will be available at Apple Stores and Mac dealers on Saturday according to this News.Com article by the usually reliable Joe Wilcox. That free CDs would be distributed by some Apple dealers was first published by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and confirmed from Apple by Gene Steinberg on his Mac Night Owl web site as we recently noted.[Dana Baggett]