Steve Jobs Expected To Says "Can You Hear Me Now?" At The WWDC Smack Down

Look for Steve Jobs to cover three topics in his keynote speech Monday that kicks off Apple’s week-long Worldwide Developers Conference: Leopard, Leopard, and some more Leopard and a little iPhone.

Expect Jobs to spend most of his time on stage talking about his company's professional-grade machines and tools. He's been waiting a year to show off some secret features in the latest version of the Mac operating system, dubbed Leopard.

The surprise better be good. After all, the company said in April that it would be delaying the launch of Leopard from June until October. Apple's excuse that Leopard engineers were needed to get iPhone out the door by the end of June was plausible, but it's also going to raise the stakes.

What might Leopard deliver? Apple-watchers are hoping, as always, for the dramatic. Some imagine a new system that, because it was developed in tandem with the touch-centric iPhone, allows for touchable Apple display screens. Others want a new interface that departs from the window-pane format embraced by the entire PC industry (especially Microsoft's Windows). A few go so far as to predict Jobs will announce a Mac operating system that runs Windows Vista, or better yet, runs Vista programs without running Vista itself.

Whatever Jobs has in store with Leopard, he doesn't want to disappoint his developers; he needs each and every one of them. Though Apple has been ramping up its Mac sales in recent months the company's U.S. computer sales market share increased from 4% to 5% between April 2006 and April 2007, according to Gartner machines running Microsoft's Windows, from hardware vendors Hewlett-Packard and Dell , maintain near total control of the market.

And though Vista is receiving knocks for a clumsy interface and security issues from reviewers, Microsoft still managed to sell more than 20 million copies of it in its first month out. Apple sold 1.5 million computers in the first three months of 2007.