Steve Jobs Headlines Keynote Address and Leopard Preview Today at WWDC 2006--Our View

This morning, Pacific time, Steve Jobs will take the stage at San Francisco's Moscone Center West and deliver the keynote address to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2006. He will provide a preview of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"--that much we know but what else will be divulged?

Now that Intel has released its second generation 64-bit Core 2 Duo line of CPUs, we expect that Steve Jobs will announce the Power Mac replacement, probably called the "Mac Pro" running the top-end Core 2 Duo CPU, possibly two of them, called "Woodcrest." We also believe that Apple will keep its Pro equipment at the cutting edge so we expect that the MacBook Pro will get the upgraded notebook version of the Core 2 Duo CPU called "Merom."

It will be interesting to see if Apple follows the same strategy with its consumer line, i.e. the iMac, MacBook and Mac mini. It would seem that finances might dictate that they stay a step behind the pro line. There is room to boost their speeds with Core Duo CPUs without them jumping to the Core 2 Duo CPUs right now. And in 6 months or so, Intel will release another set of CPUs that will best the just-released Core 2 Duo line with quad cores.

We'll post the news as it is released today. [Bill Fox]