Jobs to skip WWDC keynote in June

Apple on Wed. said that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will pass on presenting the keynote at the company's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Instead, Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, will take the stage.

The announcement is a bit of deja vu,  reminding the community of January, when Jobs took a bye on the Macworld Expo keynote and Schiller was the pinch hitter.

Apple said that Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, will be the star of the conference, along with iPhone 3.0.

"Last June, we gave developers an early look at the powerful new technologies that form the underpinnings of Mac OS X Snow Leopard," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "At WWDC, we will be giving our developers a final Developer Preview release so they can see the incredible progress we've made on Snow Leopard and work with us as we move toward its final release."

Snow Leopard and Mac technical sessions will showcase hundreds of refinements to the operating system and dive deep into its new technologies including a 64-bit architecture, QuickTime X, next-generation multicore and GPU processor support, and amazing new accessibility technologies. iPhone OS 3.0 technical sessions will cover introductory and advanced concepts to help developers get the most out of the iPhone OS 3.0 SDK and over 1,000 new APIs available for iPhone OS 3.0.

There are many differing opinions on the release timeframe for Snow Leopard. Or how it will be delivered to customers. More to follow on that subject.