So recently some rumors came about in which OS X 10.6 would be shown off at WWDC next week. At first I thought “No,” but then I started to think “Maybe.”
You see Leopard actually shipped on October 26, 2007, nearly 8 months ago. The average time between OS X releases is roughly 13 months and that means that we could be seeing the next version of OS X actually being released sometime around November of this year.
The rumor actually says that we will be seeing early builds of 10.6 with a release in January, not exactly unreasonable to me, especially since the last two versions of OS X took Apple 18 months to release, January would set this wait time at 15 months. And, if the rumor is true, that this next version of OS X wouldn’t have any substantial new features but instead be dropping support of PowerPC and just making the overall OS more rock solid, it is not far fetched in the least.
So now that I’ve explained it a little bit, WWDC would be the perfect place for Apple to start talking about the next version of OS X and since it seems very timely I think it will happen.
Oh, and by the way many have been calling this next version of OS X “Snow Leopard” which makes a lot of sense, it is just like Leopard, with almost no extra features but incredibly good at working in a specific environment (Intel processors). This means that Snow Leopard could very well be the name, but I do want to point out that from my calculations, Lion is the only other big cat left for Apple to use as code names.