Good Morning Silicon Valley

Given the obsessive amount of detailed preparation that goes into a Steve Jobs presentation, if these purportedly leaked notes for tomorrow’s Macworld keynote are the real deal, someone inside the company best start inquiring about the Witless Protection Program. A long list of bullet points labeled “MacWorld January 2008 Keynote; Rough Outline; draft 5″ was posted to Wikipedia last night (apparently gone now, but preserved at Pocket-lint) laying out Jobs’ remarks from greetings to “one more thing.” For whatever it’s worth, the notes have Jobs, among other things, announcing a 16GB iPhone for $499, an iPhone SDK allowing third parties to develop and sell apps and widgets, new MacBooks, refreshed versions of the Mac Pro and Mac mini, and the inclusion of YouTube videos in iTunes.

Skepticism abounds, and rightly so. Apple watchers are basing their doubts on things like the lack of any mention of the expected iTunes video rentals and a reference to an un-Apple-like eject button on a DVD drive. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet says, “I’ve read it and it sounds convincing enough (larger capacity devices, price drops, a few new things that’s already been guessed at), but I have a really hard time accepting that anything that was going to come out of Steve Jobs’ mouth could appear on Wikipedia or anywhere else before it was uttered. … My money is on this being a hoax.” On the other hand, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion ventures, “I could be wrong. But my gut is, this is the real deal and it’s a big moment in the history of public relations. How big? Very big. This is like Fort Knox getting unlocked. Apple has long operated under a universal code of silence. And this event — again if it is true — shows that those days are gone.”

So — true, semi-true or false? Make a printout (along with your keynote bingo card), follow along tomorrow and we’ll see if the audience beats Jobs to his punch lines.