Hasta La Gadget!

Florida-based Psystar–the company best known for manufacturing Mac clones (or, at least attempting to) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last Thursday, a move that no doubt has more than a little to do with Apple’s unwavering legal action against the company.

The filing will mark a hiatus in Apple’s suit, in order to move ahead with the bankruptcy. A hearing will begin on the case on June 5th. The stay in the lawsuit should be over in a matter of a few months, according to the presiding judge.

The hearing will reveal, among other things, any creditors who have helped fund the company, opening them up to litigation from Apple.

There’s been plenty of talk surrounding an upcoming Apple tablet or touchscreen netbook, and while many of the rumors have this multimedia device arriving around the same time as the new iPhone (i.e., later this summer), Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says not so fast.

“We expect the development of such an OS to be underway currently, but its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe it will not launch until CY10,” Munster said in a recent statement.

Such a device, according to Munster, would run a version of OS X optimized for touchscreens.

The revelation that Steve Jobs won’t be presenting the keynote at this year’s Apple Worldwide Developers’ Conference on June 8th has created a lot of speculation in the blogosphere, with random financial analysts claiming that this means Apple won’t release an iPhone at the show, and sharp-eyed observers like Jon Gruber disagreeing.

One thing to understand about financial analysts is that they often don’t have any special knowledge – they’re just speculating, like you or I do. And Gruber makes the excellent point that if Apple wants to present new hardware APIs to iPhone developers, they’ll have to show the new iPhone first.

With Apple basically admitting that they aren’t going to launch Snow Leopard at the show (instead providing a “developer preview,”) the show could be extremely anticlimactic without some new hardware being announced.

Speculation that Steve will come back in a gala performance at the end of June also seems a little off-key to me. Apple previously said that Jobs will come back in June, but keynotes are intense, stressful, and very physical experiences. While it would be an amazing show of Steve’s fitness to throw a keynote in late June, his doctors and family might prefer him to ease back into work a little more gently.

I’ll be at WWDC providing live coverage of Schiller’s keynote, and whatever else appears. After all, Steve Jobs still might be the “one more thing” at the show.

Apple today announced that it will open its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote hosted by senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, Philip Schiller. The news about the keynote, which is set for June 8th at 10:00 AM PST, isn’t about who is running things so much as who won’t be–CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave, was originally set to make a return to the company next month–which many suspected would coincide with the WWDC keynote, over which he has traditionally presided. The absence of Jobs, a long-time media darling, from the last few Apple product announcements has made nearly as many headlines as the products the company has rolled out.

Most are expecting Apple to use the WWDC keynote to introduce the third iteration of the company’s popular iPhone handset. But barring a famous “one more thing” involving Jobs himself, the absence of the company’s head will likely cast a shadow over the new product.