Yes folks, it’s that time of year again. Tomorrow morning at 10am PST, 1pm EST and 5pm GMT, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will take to the stage at WWDC ’06 to unleash a raft more products to the development community and the Mac faithful alike.

 

Hot picks for this years WWDC are the Mac Pro (Intel replacement of the PowerMac, that one’s a lock), OS X 10.5 Leopard (beta copies for developers), and possibly some Core 2 Duo BTO upgrades for the iMac and MacBook Pro lines.

 

Rumours abound that in a sensational ‘One more thing’ moment, Jobs will announce an Apple ‘iPhone’, with various fabrications and half-truths confirming one another in details. Unfortunately, confirming a rumour with a rumour is rather like building a house on sand, and it seems unlikely to this writer that Apple would launch into the mobile phone industry at this point, and launch a consumer oriented product at a developer oriented conference. Taking a simplistic viewpoint, it’s likely Apple would take one of two paths with a phone-like device; the first would be to create a WiFi VoIP device, to match the Skype-rivalling iChat 4.0 rumoured to be launched at WWDC ’06. The second would be a music oriented device to partially add to the iPod familly. The latter, I just can’t see. Apple already have a flagship flash-based low capacity music player, a further device would reduce nano sales and mean that the company would have two competing products within one line. It’s just not good business sense.