Other companies must envy Apple its ability to generate attention. The rumours that preceded this weeks’ Apple WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) were many, various and mostly wrong. The point about the WWDC was that Steve Jobs would do a keynote. So would he announce a new iPod or iPhone or iTunes service or iVideo player or games machine or space shot? Rumours to the contrary, the answer was no. But he was definitely going to announce a new computer—which he did, the Mac Pro, thus completing Apple’s conversion to Catholicism or was it Intelism? And he was also going to announce some features of Leopard, the coming version of OS X.

This is where much was expected of the Joltin’ Jobs and, to be honest, he came out firing blanks. He congratulated Microsoft for rampant plagiarism, depicting the Redmond Replicators as Elvis impersonators (Vista is a clone of OS X Tiger in many ways) and then proceeded to showcase some new features of Leopard which were underwhelming even to most of the Apple faithful.

However, it’s obvious why he was keeping his powder dry. He has delayed the release of Leopard to ensure that it coincides with the release of Vista, which will be release some time er, eventually, er, maybe. If I were Microsoft I’d be worried. Apple has no good reason to do this other than to ensure that the two OSes are directly compared. It will cost Apple 3 months OS revenue at the least.

So Steve was a damp squib as far as cool new products are concerned (unless you think the Mac Pro is cool. I do, I love high spec workstations, but it’s a minority taste). But it didn’t matter. Within a few days the Apple rumours were buzzing again amongst the devout. Jupiter is in the fourth house, the Moon is trine to Venus, Scorpio is rising and the owl hoots close to the house. There’s an iPodPhoneMegaGamesPortable coming in September for sure.