I’ve seen a few rumour sites suggest that Apple is preparing to seed developers with an early 10.6 release of their operating system. You can read about it here. If true, it sounds like it’s more of a maintenance/stability release, which makes me really wonder why they would name it a 10.6 instead of a 10.5.4. And to be honest, I’d be really disappointed if they were to release 10.6 as a real, full fledged (i.e. you have to pay more money) update to the operating system, considering Leopard isn’t that old and that it’s far from stable as it is.
It’s obviously just a rumour, so I’m not going to worry too much about it, but I’m starting to question some of Apple’s business practices of late.
Don’t forget that Leopard was released, as an early ‘preview’ to developers way in advance of it being released as a true beta – with the preview being a jacked up version of Tiger.
So while they *could* release 10.6 at WWDC, most likely it would be a preliminary build, or simply lay out the roadmap for 10.6’s release. I highly doubt it would simply be a stability release only as the rumour sites have been reporting. Steve likes to have a giant list of new features (as small as the may be) any time they roll out a new version.
I’ll be there, and will let try and liveblog the SteveNote. My impression is it will mostly be about the 3G iPhone and some demos of iPhone running the SDK software, as well as (perhaps) something new for the desktop, since Apple is still missing a ‘mid’ level desktop for people who don’t want to pay the high price or don’t have the space for a Mac Pro, but don’t want a big screen iMac. The IIc and IIci were big sellers for them in that form factor years ago, so it’s still possible.
I sure hope that the Rogers plan is decent. I went over on my last data plan by accident (had installed a program on my iPhone that downloaded a ton of crap in the background) and got a bill for over $1600!!! Fortunately I was able to claim that I had no idea what was going on, and they forgave it that one time and bumped me up to a higher data plan. Now the data rate is still high, but the chances of a multi-thousand dollar bill are far less likely.