Apple
My wife's uncle worked at Motorola back when they were the major supplier of CPUs for Apple. Also, I've personally known a few people who worked for Apple in varying positions within the company.
Motorola is a far less secretive company than Apple. My wife's uncle is one of the engineers who designed their cell phone processors and other ICs. So it's not like the guy doesn't know his silicon (meaning about CPUs and what Motorola offered at the time). That being said, much of the time, he did not know what CPU Motorola was going to be shipping to Apple before a keynote even though the CPU has to be designed, fabricated, and shipped to Apple months and months before a machine is released. Part of this is that he worked on cell phones, part of this is that it was a major deal within Motorola not to give away tons of info on what they would be shipping to Apple. The most he would ever get was a "You should see what we're going to be shipping to Apple soon" from one of the PPC engineers. So he'd know something cool was on the horizon, but never know what it is.
Apple in the other hand is crazy about secrecy. They sometimes distribute incorrect information to certain teams with Apple in order to track leaks. I've heard that early builds of OSX are digitally tagged in order to track down leaks, from reputable sources. This is why you're not seeing Leopard available for download yet. It's not that someone couldn't easily post it in a normally untraceable way, it's that the internal Apple developer's copy of OSX is probably tagged, so they'd immediately know who leaked it. The WWDC copies of OSX Leopard will almost certainly appear in pirate circles within a week or two of the conference due to the fact that it'd be nearly impossible to tag them and track who got which copy, especially considering the number of copies they will be distributing at WWDC.
What I have been able to easily get info on in the past from Apple employees, is when a show is going to be a snooze or a killer show. In the case of the bad shows (like when the G4 was stuck at 500Mhz), I'd heard that there was a definite undercurrent of "do not get in the elevator with Steve Jobs this week" at Apple. The people in question I talked to were tense during these times. Other times I'd hear from them that the show was going to be stellar, and that they'd heard from the "guys in hardware" that it was going to rock, but never any major specifics. When Apple introduced "Mystic" the people I knew at Apple were very upbeat on the other hand.
I have gotten a few tidbits here and there, but for most Apple employees, they won't know what's being released until it is. This goes double for the retail staff. Form factor is something that only the engineers on that project, and the top management of the company may be in on. So if your source is Jobs
, then he probably knows what the Mac Pro will look like. If your source is a core OSX programmer or nearly anyone there who doesn't work on that team, almost certainly they won't know. New hardware and form factor info is basically the most guarded thing at Apple. OSX is probably one of the least guarded, being that many developers within Apple will have early builds of the "next OSX" to make sure that iLife, or whatever program works on the next version of the OS perfectly. These builds have to be given to the programming teams months before the "next OSX" ships. These builds are also delivered to developers for the same reason.
So it's generally safe to say that while the general Apple employee in Cupertino may sense an undercurrent of excitement when good stuff is coming, they probably won't know specifics. Furthermore, there have been times when I have heard from people at Apple that at the very last minute, Steve Jobs decided that something wasn't ready, or couldn't be made ready, and cut it from the keynote. You don't want to work on the team responsible for a project that gets cut at the last minute. Some of the lamer keynotes had quite a few things cut, and watching them online it's easy to see that Jobs is annoyed (like the time he threw the camera at the iPhoto guys). So in many cases there's less than a dozen people at Apple who will really know what will be on the floor before a keynote more than a few days before it happens. Sometimes it's just Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately for me, those people that I knew who worked at Apple don't anymore.
