Does Apple like developers, or not?

I'm trying to weigh up and balance some conflicting thoughts relating to Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), which I understand takes place in San Francisco on June 7 next week. On the face of it, the event looks to be an all singing affair with all the normal bells and whistles. But here's what I don't like…

Reports suggest that there will be a less of a deep dive technical focus and that the Apple Design Awards will feature fewer categories related to hard core software application development – with more focus being reserved for design, user experience and innovation.

Beef number #2 – there's no press section on the website so how are developer-focused journalists expected to dig in and eat up all those yummy press releases that, um, actually don't exist (unless I am wrong and I'm not seeing it). They are in fact only to be found on Apple's main press site I am told.

It also appears that that any pure OS X sessions will be hard to come by as Apple is only serving up OS X with a generous side order of iPhone OS tuition this year. With what was known as the "IT Track" apparently also absent, one questions whether Apple's consumer-facing brand style has rather gotten the better of it this year.

The company bills this event as featuring, "5 days. 1,000 Apple engineers. 5,000 of your peers." Perhaps developers are meant to wander the halls to track down one of these 1000 engineers so they can pose some direct questions.

All that being said, the technical tracks and sessions do appear to be pretty feature rich if you check out this link, but I think there are enough questionable concerns to at least raise the uncertainties that I have here don't you?

One thing is for sure, Steve Jobs won't be too happy about this spoiler story on Gizmodo, which claims to have found a lost unit of the next iPhone. Was that going to be the keynote announcement? Perhaps Mr Jobs will focus on the Mac OS X operating system after all then.