Leopard Is No Phone’s No. 2

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Leopard rumors refuse to ride in iPhone’s side car.

Against all possible odds, the talk leading up to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, to be held June 12 in San Francisco, is NOT about the iPhone.

If the Apple rumor mill is to be trusted, the company will debut the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, named Snow Leopard.

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) claims it has information that Apple “may seed developers with an early build of Mac OS X 10.6 at this year’s WWDC.”

From TUAW:

“We have also learned that OS X 10.6 may go gold master by December 2008 in an effort to start shipping it in January ’09 at Macworld Expo. Mac OS X 10.6 will be a milestone release for Apple, as it will leave the PowerPC behind: a fully 64-bit clean, Intel-only Mac OS X.”

Apple has already dropped hints about Snow Leopard, including references in the iPhone SDK.

Apple is expected to unveil the 3G iPhone (as CNET reports AT&T is all out of the current model… Hmm?) and a MobileMe online service to replace Apple’s .Mac service.