I’ve been reading on other sites that Steve Jobs may have lost his magic because of his keynote speech yesterday at the WWDC. I have two alternate theories for his keynote performance.

By the way, I thought that his performance was fine and allowing other people to discuss the new features of OS X and the Mac Pros was fine. Steve Jobs is smart enough not to do a keynote where there aren’t enough announcements to justify the use of Reality Distortion Field (“RDF”).

Theory 1: Steve Jobs did not have his Reality Distortion Field in full effect because he was angry with his Mac OS X team.

Why do I think this? In January, Apple hyped the Leopard preview at WWDC 2006. The Leopard preview yesterday was a bit underwhelming – it had some cool features, but nothing that captured the attention of the tech world. Steve Jobs discussed that there are a lot of “Top Secret” things that they didn’t want Redmond to copy just yet.

Apple is usually unafraid to show off their new OS technologies because their technologies are difficult to copy on short notice. Vista is not completed and any new feature shown off at WWDC 2006 would never make it into the first release of Vista. Microsoft couldn’t even implement its own WinFS file system.

Steve Jobs could have easily been so frustrated with the delay of Leopard from pre-Vista to post-Vista that he could not get his RDF up in full effect. He did not believe in the product and could not show off buggy new features and have a Microsoft-like experience during a keynote speech.

Frustration could have led to the underwhelming keynote.

Theory 2: Leopard is actually a lame duck and OS 11 is coming sooner than we think.

I’m aware that OS X is only up to 10.5, and a jump to OS 11 seems premature. Banners around WWDC had messages such as “Hasta la vista, Vista” and “Introducing Vista 2.0.” A totally new Mac OS would knock Redmond for a loop.

Think about it. It’s one thing to show that Vista and OS X have many similarities. However, Apple could really mock Redmond with a major revision to its OS by jumping to 11. Perhaps the delay to OS 10.5 is because the OS team has been divided once again. An uninspired team is working on OS 10.5, while the other half is working on the next generation OS, OS 11.

With all the rumors surrounding OS 10.5 and its features, perhaps the features are true, but belong to another Apple OS. I’ll even name the new Apple OS after OS X. Welcome to OS neXt. It would keep the “X” and give Steve Jobs a chuckle throwing the Next name in there.

The OS team did port over OS X to intel almost seamlessly (I say almost because Classic does not function under the intel OS X). With the new intel architecture, the Mac OS team has the chance to create a new OS from scratch. This OS neXt would include virtualization of Windows and Linux programs. If it’s a program, it will run on OS neXt. There’s no reason to run anything else.

With Apple’s switch to intel they are able to say a Mac is the only computer you need. With a brand new OS, Apple could say that the Mac OS is the only OS you need because it runs everything under the sun.