Edible Apple

As had been rumored, Apple today announced that its annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be held from June 6 through June 10th at the Moscone West convention center in San Francisco. Passes to the conference are on sale for $1599 and should be picked up quick if you’re planning on attending. Attendance to WWDC over the past few years has skyrocketed with the rise of the iPhone and with iOS 5 and OS X Lion on the horizon, WWDC will probably sell out extremely quickly.

“At this year’s conference we are going to unveil the future of iOS and Mac OS,” Phil Schiller said in the invite. “If you are an iOS or Mac OS X software developer, this is the event that you do not want to miss.”

WWDC will offer developers over 100 technical sessions conducted by Apple engineers. There will also be over 1,000 Apple engineers on hand to help developers with writing code and overall development techniques. And of course, it’s a great opportunity for developers to meet with other iOS developers from around the globe.

But one thing that may be conspicuously missing from this year’s event is an iPhone announcement. Though Apple has routinely unveiled and released a new iPhone every Summer since the original debuted in 2007, the well-connected Jim Darlymple of The Loop writes that this year’s WWDC event will focus exclusively on new software and will not be a hardware event.

Moreover, sources in the Chinese supply chain told Macotakara.jp on Monday that Apple has yet to order components for the iPhone 5 and that the device is not expected to contribute to Apple’s 2011 fiscal year which ends on September 24th. If accurate, this means that the iPhone 5 wouldn’t launch until late September or October at the earliest. The report notes that the iPhone 5 will launch in the first half of Fiscal 2012 but a late Fall launch is more likely given that Apple would want to have a new product on the market in time for the busy holiday shopping season.

Interestingly enough, it was reported this past weekend that Apple plans to release iOS 5 later this Fall. At first glance the news seemed odd since Apple typically releases new iPhone hardware alongside new iOS updates. With news that an iPhone 5 launch may be pushed back until October or November, reports of iOS 5 launching in the Fall now make a lot more sense.

So is iOS 5 being pushed back because of the iPhone 5 release date or vice versa? It’s hard to say but with Apple making a big push to release OS X Lion this Summer, it’s within the realm of possibility that Apple’s engineering resources are running thin. This weekend we observed,

If you recall, Apple openly conceded that the release of Leopard OS X 10.5 in 2007 was delayed because of work that needed to be done on the as-of-then unreleased iPhone. In a statement that appeared on Apple’s website in April 2007, Apple candidly explained, “We had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned.”

So one plausible theory might be that with OS X Lion next on the docket, Apple isn’t capable of finishing up work on iOS 5 in time for a Summer iPhone launch. And rather than release new iPhone hardware without a new OS update, the powers that be at Apple made the executive decision to push back both the iOS update and iPhone 5 release until later this Fall.