When many of you read this article, you will know precisely what revelations Apple has in store for us during the WWDC keynote. So rather than simply date myself and make guesses that won’t pan out, or just repeat what all of you have read over and over again, let’s look at what comes after the great event.

You know, for example, that a new iPhone will be almost immediately compared with the just-released Palm Pre. However, to be fair to Palm, it is still a version 1.0 product, whereas Apple has had more time to get the hardware right, and to add key software features.

However, even if the hardware was, minus different features, reasonably comparable, Apple would still have a decided advantage, in the form of the App Store. With over a billion sales and 40,000 selections, there’s a lot of meat and potatoes to fill the needs and desires of both individuals and businesses.

With the version 3.0 software, Apple has also made it possible to attack the vertical markets that have largely eluded them on the Mac platform. You’ll be able to hook up medical diagnostic equipment, scientific measuring devices and other gear to the iPhone’s Dock and perform an unimaginable number of test procedures. As various hardware companies embrace the iPhone, I can foresee the prospects of some choosing to build software for Mac OS X as well, which will enable many businesses to use a Mac natively, rather than depend on a Windows virtual machine or Boot Camp.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

To answer the most obvious question, yes I know that Apple has yet to officially say anything about the next iPhone. However, they did release lots of information about the forthcoming iPhone 3.0 software, and you know that, with the possible exception of a few things on the original iPhone, most of the features will be available to everyone using an iPhone or iPod touch.

That’s just a part of the picture, though. Knowing what the software is going to be like doesn’t necessarily give us any clues as to the form and configuration of the next iPhone, due this summer and sometimes called the third generation model.

Therein lies a tale that’s still being written.

The first attempts to understand what Apple is up to came with the extraction of purported icons for the new iPhone in beta versions of iPhone 3.0. However, you can’t tell much from a tiny icon and, from having seen what the rumor sites produced, it didn’t seem as if the shape was altogether different. Blink your eyes a moment, and it seems identical to the iPhone 3G.

Following that came reports of purportedly accidental entries discovered in online ordering forms from Best Buy and other vendors, which supposedly mentioned 16GB and 32GB versions. Now, real or not, this seems a pretty logical development. Forgetting any other differences for the moment, the odds are high that Flash memory on the new iPhones will be double that of the old, for roughly the same price as the previous model.

Some are suggesting a low-end configuration with 4GB, but I can see keeping an 8GB version around for $99 to really pull in customers for whom higher prices are deal breakers. Now I should point out that the competition from RIM and Palm are asking $199 or more for competitive gear, so it’s not as if there’s an Apple Tax on their smartphones.

But don’t get me started about that.

The real issue is why I think Apple is engaged in a marketing campaign to ramp up expectations for news about the next iPhone during the keynote on June 8th at the WWDC in San Francisco. While it’s not that some isolated rumblings should necessarily prove that Apple is behind it, when premature entries “accidentally” appear on catalog listings, you have to wonder just what’s really afoot.

More interesting is the Palm Pre review from Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walter Mossberg. He actually likes the new Palm smartphone and finds it a credible competitor to the iPhone. But he also cautions that may all change with the next model: “I expect to see an iPhone with up to 32 gigabytes of memory, video recording, a higher-resolution camera, a compass, and greater operating speed. Plus, there are persistent rumors that Apple will announce at least one iPhone at a drastically lower price than $199.”

Before you suggest that Mossberg may be doing nothing more than repeating the rumors we’ve all read, bear in mind that he probably knows exactly what he’s talking about here from personal experience. You see Mossberg, The New York Times columnist David Pogue and a few selected journalists from Newsweek and Time, frequently get review samples of new Apple gadgets weeks or months before anyone else. So on the day of a product’s actual release, these favored few are able to publish their reviews.

Assuming that a new iPhone lineup will be announced next week and officially placed on sale four or five weeks later, you can be reasonably assured that Mossberg already has one or more units in his possession. Now maybe it’s a preproduction model — and he would get the regular retail product shortly — but he still knows the final configuration. When he says “I expect,” he is just going along with Apple’s marketing people. His expectations are very likely confirmed facts.

Add that to that the less-confirmed rumors spreading online and on the printed page, and you have to feel Apple is behind the surge of publicity. If I am right about all this — and I always reserve the right to be dead wrong as usual — next week’s carefully rehearsed production will go on as scheduled and will provide both the expected announcements and perhaps a few surprises.

I have, of course, already suggested that there’s a possibility Steve Jobs might do a short cameo during the keynote. That suspicion comes from the recent stories about Steve Wozniak’s conversation with Jobs and his assurances that he seemed quite healthy, plus the rumors that Jobs has actually been seen on the Apple campus.

Of course, it would be far more fun to see a dated photo of Jobs at Apple, perhaps taken with a Palm Pre for the appropriate level of poetic justice. But I don’t really expect that’s going to happen.

I suppose it would be nice to see your applications launch faster and your applications actually begin to use the two, four or eight cores of processor power that today’s Macs offer. That may be more than sufficient reason to buy an operating system that, for most practical purposes, otherwise offers few new features.

When I recently wrote an article about whether you even need a more powerful Mac these days, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the advantages. While you can’t retrieve your email any faster, nor will your Web pages come sooner, there are decided advantages to having more CPU horsepower.

Consider such basic functions as ripping a CD in iTunes. For this common task, it is absolutely true that a Mac with four cores can do up to twice as fast as the dual-core variety. What this means, of course, is that Apple has optimized iTunes to support multiple processors. It’s too bad that so many apps don’t, and that’s very true even for business software.

In the course of my work, for example, I regularly convert a pair of two-hour radio shows each week from QuickTime MP4 audio to MP3. That way most anyone can play the shows on pretty much any decent PC or music player on the planet. This is, of course, deliberate. High compatibility means more listeners, and, well, you get the picture.

None of the apps I use to make that conversion, however, seem to exercise more than one processor core on my Mac Pro, which has two quad-cores. Some run more efficiently, however. It takes Amadeus Pro, a shareware audio editor, a little over two minutes to perform the task, whereas Bias Peak Pro 6, a mainstay in the recording industry, requires as much as eight minutes. Go figure.

The arrival of Snow Leopard will mean vastly improved support for multiprocessors and it will even make it possible to offload tasks to your Mac’s graphics chip when it’s not otherwise occupied with gaming or other chores.

A you might expect, it won’t be an entirely automatic process. If an application calls on a system-related function, it will benefit from those potentially vast performance improvements. For other tasks, the developer will have to do the heavy lifting and compile an upgrade. I presume Apple will tell us that it will be a trivial process, one as trivial as (I suppose) making universal applications to run on the PowerPC and Intel.

Except that correctly optimizing and debugging an application can still take weeks or months to accomplish, so don’t expect a spate of multiprocessor-savvy software right at the starting gate. But remember that Mac OS X will be a faster beast, so there will be some improvement anyway.

Now I realize that thousands of Mac developers are already pounding away at Snow Leopard, and they could tell us many fascinating tales. On the other hand, Apple’s betas are protected by confidentiality agreements, and I would not be so bold as to ask anyone to break that contract. If you want to be an Apple developer and get the software seeds, you play by the rules and that’s the end of the discussion.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from reading the ubiquitous articles online that purport to reveal details about the status of Snow Leopard and, in some cases, screen shots.

At next week’s WWDC, Apple will present developers with the so-called “final beta,” and that could mean that there will be significant changes that will send them all scrambling to get their products compatible before Mac OS 10.6’s final release. Or maybe not. With Apple you can’t predict, and I won’t even try. Besides, we’ll all know the truth in just a few days.

The question mark about Snow Leopard is that, regardless of whether it stays at the standard $129 level or a lower “special price,” will a large number of Mac users be willing to get an upgrade that delivers few visible changes? Sure, the promise of much greater performance, even if benchmarked, may not be sufficient to sway most customers.

Also bear in mind that, according to the rumors mentioned above, Snow Leopard will only support Macs with Intel processors. I suppose that makes sense, if those stories are true, since it’ll come over three and a half years after the first Macs with “Intel Inside” appeared. While I suppose those of you with older Macs might feel disappointed, a lot of what Snow Leopard does requires multiprocessing and a decent graphics chip, and loads of Macs with the PowerPC simply don’t fit into that category. That’s how it is, folks.

At the same time, Snow Leopard will no doubt be preloaded onto new Macs within hours after its official release, so within a year or so the early adopter equation won’t be so significant.

One intriguing aspect of all this is how the inevitable Snow Leopard versus Windows 7 war will fare this fall. Remember, Windows 7 is largely a baked over version of Vista, offering better performance and some interface tweaks, such as a Dock-like taskbar cribbed from Apple. But you could also say that Snow Leopard is just a warmed over version of Leopard, right?

So, without any fanfare, Apple released an 8.2 update to iTunes Monday afternoon. For the most part, the list of changes is typically opaque, about “accessibility improvements and bug fixes.” However, one item is curious, that the update “now supports iPhone or iPod touch with the iPhone 3.0 Software Update.”

Now I don’t know about you, but I expected the next version of iPhone software would accompany the release of new iPhone hardware, the so-called third generation models. With an expected announcement about the new products at next week’s WWDC, they would probably go on sale a few weeks later.

Certainly, this whole scenario seems sensible enough. Apple and its dealers are busy moving as many of the existing models out the door as possible, to pave the way for the new inventories. Basically the iPhone 3G would be worth little when its successor appears, assuming major changes arrive, although a blowout sale might attract buyers on a budget.

As most of you recall, Apple last year went a little too far in getting several new products and services out the door. The iPhone firmware update, the 3G models, and the launch of the service formerly known as .Mac. The entire collection brought Apple’s massive server farms to their knees, and you just know they don’t want to repeat that awful experience this year, particularly in light of the renewed competition from Microsoft and other companies.

Worse, the initial iPhone 2.0 software update appeared half-baked, and it required several revisions to straighten things out. That surely didn’t sit too well with early adopters, particularly when they encountered frequent disconnects.

Before you remind me that Apple is receiving tax incentives to locate a one billion dollar center in North Carolina, let me remind you that construction of that place wouldn’t be finished for a year or two, even if it was declared shovel ready tomorrow. So that’s not a factor; that facility is designed to handle expected future capacity.

Now some are suggesting the new version of iTunes came out early strictly to give tens of thousands of iPhone developers an opportunity to give the new software some rigorous testing before the final release, but does that make sense?

Consider that Apple could just as well supply developers with iTunes 8.2 for their internal testing along with their copies of the iPhone 3.0 betas. Why make the software generally available, when only a small number of people might require it? That is unless the new software is just about finished and it’s poised for fast release.

Even more fascinating is a rumor, unconfirmed of course, that Apple has notified developers it has completed testing of the push notification feature, an important component of the new iPhone software.

So think about what might occur next week, near the conclusion of Monday’s WWDC keynote. It would happen thusly: Philip Schiller or another Apple executive demonstrates the new software, focusing on the major new features, such as cut, copy and paste. Maybe there will be a few choice tidbits that were previously not mentioned. Regardless, he would then state that the firmware is available for immediate download.

Assuming that the next generation iPhone, which will no doubt also be demonstrated, will be released in mid-July, that will allow Apple to allow customers to have at it and afford sufficient time to rush a maintenance update or two in case it is required. I realize that you probably don’t want to be placed in a position where you’re going to be expected to beta test software when all you want is something that works.

From a practical standpoint, you’d also expect that the major impact to Apple’s servers would be during the first week when most of the downloads are apt to occur. That way, when people line up around the block to get their new iPhones a few weeks later, the pain of lengthy ordering procedures and delayed activation will be relatively infrequent. Or at least, that’s what I would expect in such a situation.

These predictions may be way out in left field, but a healthy dose of logic makes it seem, to me at least, to be perfectly sensible. That, however, all depends on the condition of the new iPhone software. Although developers have reportedly received several updates already, none appear to bear the label “Final Candidate” or “Release Candidate,” which are common terms for software that’s in the final stages of development.

That, however, doesn’t mean all that much, since Apple doesn’t always do what people want or expect.

But why else release iTunes 8.2 now, unless there’s something in those “accessibility improvements and bug fixes” that might be far more substantial.

As of the time I’m writing this article, though, iTunes still tells me that my iPhone 3G software “is the current version.” But I’ll be checking again tomorrow if for no reason than to satisfy my curiousity. No, gentle reader, it will not be done to vindicate my predictions.