Apple Conference to clash with E3

The annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is to take place at exactly the same time as E3 2011 this year, although it is unclear if Apple is purposefully attempting to overshadow a major video game event or not.

This year's WWDC will take place from June 6 through June 10 at San Francisco's Moscone West. E3 2011 is due to run from June 7 to 9 at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with hardware manufacturer media events traditionally taking place on the two days preceding E3 itself.

Although its attendance is purposefully smaller the WWDC is, like E3, the most prominent regular event for its industry. It is often used by Apple to make major new hardware and software announcements, such as the iPhone 4 last year. Third party developers also regularly use it to reveal new products.

This year's WWDC is widely rumoured not to feature any major new hardware, with neither an iPhone 5 or iPad 3 thought to be imminent. E3 2011 is expected to see the first public hands-on demonstration of the NGP portable console, with speculation suggesting that Nintendo may allude to its next home console.

For the last four years WWDC has been held in the second week of June, while E3 has run in the first or second week of June since returning to its original format in 2009. Prior to that E3 has been held variously in May and July.

Although the clash of dates can again be put down to coincidence Apple was accused of purposefully scheduling the announcement of the iPad 2 close to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata's keynote speech at the 2011 Game Developers Conference.

Apple then went on to launch the iPad 2 in Europe on exactly the same day as the Nintendo 3DS, although again many commentators attributed this more to an attempt to beat rival tablets to market rather than a direct competition with Nintendo.