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With only a couple of weeks to go until Apple's 2008 Worldwide Developer Conference we know very little about what the company and specifically Steve Jobs will use the event to promote. Although aimed at those who make their living from creating and selling software for Apple products, WWDC has over the years been as much about Jobs' keynote speech - and the carefully stage-managed glimpses he gives of forthcoming Apple tools.

In past years, the CEO's keynote has previewed the upcoming Mac OS X and announced major shifts in company strategy such as the switch to Intel processors. This year there's been no mention of Mac OS X 10.6 and as Apple has already said that release schedules for future versions will be less frequent, it seems unlikely that Jobs will have anything to say about the next Mac OS variant.

It's far more likely that he will demonstrate iPhone 2.0, the next version of the iPhone and iPod touch operating system, and show off some applications which have already been written using early versions of the software development kit.

Given the apparent shortage of 8GB and 16GB iPhones for sale, it could well be that Apple is preparing to launch a 3G smartphone. WWDC would seem a logical place for such an announcement as it will be heavily iPhone-focused anyway.

That Apple now spends so much of its time on the iPod and iPhone (to the extent that to finish the latter, it delayed Mac OS X Leopard) may cause Mac OS X developers to wonder whether it is as committed to its desktop and mobile

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computers as it should be.

After all, the only significant change we've seen in the line-up since the shift to Intel was the debut of the aluminium iMac last summer. While an excellent machine it's hardly revolutionary, sharing its overall look and many of its features with its predecessor.

The MacBook Pro has been upgraded only incrementally since the launch of the first aluminium PowerBook five years ago, while the Mac Pro has the same case and overall design as the Power Mac G5, first introduced in 2003. As for the Mac mini, what once appeared a smart move by a company that seemed to be listening to potential customers' demands for a low-cost Mac now looks like an unwanted runt, tolerated but never celebrated.

As Adam Banks points out in Escape, the apparent inertia and lack of imagination in Apple's Mac hardware department could mean one of two things. Either the company has run out of ideas for the Mac or it has something very big in the works and has managed to keep it completely secret. The good news is that I'm convinced it's the latter; the bad tidings that it's not particularly mind-boggling. As usual though, it will seem completely logical and forehead-smackingly obvious when it is revealed.

To deduce what the boffins are brewing we must first look at the evidence. Exhibit A: OS X. Not the version that sits on your Mac and runs the apps you use day in, day out - but the version that Jobs will unveil when he launches iPhone 2.0.

We already know that the version of OS X that runs on the iPhone is a very close relation of Mac OS X and that version 2.0 will be much the same but better. So Apple now has an ultra-lightweight but extremely capable OS which will happily run on mobile devices. Exhibit B: the Asus Eee PC. This tiny offering has sold by the bucketload and become hugely popular because it's powerful enough to do what most of us need from a laptop, namely email, web browsing and word processing. It has all the features it needs to perform those tasks, runs an operating system that works well and isn't bloated, and is small enough to carry around easily.