AppleInsider has learned there will be no live streaming or satellite broadcast of Steve Jobs' keynote address next Monday at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif. Consistently, when a significant announcement is on the horizon, Apple has announced one week prior to a Jobs keynote that the event would be broadcast. With no such announcement, a lot can be deduced as of the actual direction of WWDC and what will and will not be shown.
No dual-G4 Power Mac announcement
Sources who last month reported that the highly-anticipated multiprocessor Power Mac G4 announcement would come at WWDC now indicate that no such announcement will be made. While the hardware itself is ready — Apple has fully-functional dual-G4 600 MHz machines in its labs — the holdup lies in the software. Many readers questioned the significance of Apple releasing dual-G4 Power Macs now, when few applications support the added power and Mac OS X, which will feature symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) support is still months away.
Apparently Apple has not overlooked this fact, is working at a furious pace to complete kernel-level SMP libraries/extensions for Mac OS 9. While not nearly as extensive as the multiprocessor support that will be found in Mac OS X, these SMP additions to Mac OS 9 will provide a significant boost in performance to OS and Finder-level tasks, and should also improve application performance across the board.
For all intents and purposes, Apple's multiprocessor plan seems far more sound now than it did before, despite this new delay. Had Apple released multiprocessor G4s now software support for the added capabilities would have been extremely limited. By brining some level of multiprocessor support to Mac OS 9, Apple ensures that when they unveil these machines, the new date for which is currently unknown, they'll be able to woo the crowd and the media with more than just a series of Photoshop tests.
How the market will respond to this news and what it means for Apple's hardware strategy is yet to be known. With the exception of the new PowerBook, Apple's other hardware components have gone seven to nine months now without a significant upgrade. The iBook line received a very minor memory bump in February, and the 500 MHz Power Mac G4 finally shipped six months after it was announced. The integral iMac line has also gone unchanged for seven months. All three products are overdue for a speed bump, and soon will be overdue for an entire update.
OS X will be key
With the lack of any hardware announcement now apparent, it's clear that OS X will be the centerpiece of Jobs' keynote announcement. More specifically, though, sources report that Jobs will focus on OS X as a consumer product and emphasize its role in Apple's consumer strategy.
Apple wants to ensure that OS X, due to its advanced architecture and feature set, isn't misinterpreted as an OS geared towards or exclusively for high-end users. Similarly, Apple hopes to gather more developer support for the OS from companies that have not completely embraced the new operating system, aren't sure where it would fit into their product strategy, or developers that are considering entering the Mac market.
Due to the advanced features that are available only for Carbon or Cocoa applications, Apple wants to make it clear that it is in developers' and end users' interest that applications be native to the OS, despite being able to run classic applications with little, if any, shortcomings.
A new version of OS X is also expected to seeded to developers at WWDC. Apple released DP4 internally last month, and is expected to make this release, or a newer version, available on CD to its users. At Macworld San Francisco Jobs announced that a beta version of OS X would be due during the Spring, which ends on June 21, giving Apple a little more than a month to either put together another release or to simply declare the version presented at WWDC to be the first beta.
One thing is becoming more and more apparent, and that's that OS X will not arrive for consumers at Macworld in July. At San Francisco Jobs told the keynote audience that a final version would be ready by "summer," a marketing gimmick that typically translates to the last possible day of that period, September 21st.
Given the typical length of time that Apple takes between the first beta and the final release of an OS, which for Mac OS 9 was roughly five months, it's unlikely that Apple will have anything ready to ship by July.
Jobs is also expected to demonstrate a new "turbocharged" version of WebObjects, although specifics aren't available.
Given these facts, WWDC may be a far less momentous event than originally thought, thus leading to the possibility of an Apple Media Event sometime between now and Macworld.
