Although no official announcement has been made, Apple public relations confirmed to Fortune that Steve Jobs will deliver a keynote address on June 9, the first day of the 2008 World Wide Developers conference.

It is widely expected that Jobs will use that speech to unveil the next generation of iPhones, including a so-called 3G model.

“The launch of the new model is imminent,” wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in a report to clients Monday.

Munster notes that beginning Saturday, May 10, first generation iPhones were unavailable through Apple’s online store in the United States, the most recent sign that the company is clearing inventory in advance of a new release. (Two days earlier, O2 ran out of iPhones in the United Kingdom.) On Sunday Munster called 11 Apple retail stores to check on their supply; five were completely out of stock and one of the remaining six had fewer that five phones on hand.

Munster also alerted his clients to the discovery, first reported over the weekend by MacRumors, of a switch in the latest release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware that will allow users to toggle 3G data ON for faster download speeds or OFF to conserve battery life.

Despite dwindling supplies, Munster still estimates that Apple will ship 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter that ends June 30. That’s because he expects Apple to start shipping the new model in large numbers before the end of the month.

Other signs — including the release of the new Software Developers Kit scheduled for late June and an AT&T Mobile (T) memo canceling staff vacations between June 15 and July 12 (see here) — point to Friday, June 27, as the day the new model will go on sale. That would give Apple four days of 3G iPhone sales before the quarter closes.

“Net-net,” writes Munster, “the initial surge of iPhone sales in June would likely offset the lost sales due to limited availability in May.”

The drumroll has already started on Apple’s (AAPL) website, where users can download a Dashboard widget counting down the hours before the June 9 WWDC by the days, hours, minutes and seconds.

There are an awful lot of Silicon Valley CEOs sporting beards these days. As Michael Copeland writes in the current issue of Fortune, “it takes more than leading-edge technology and a Stanford MBA to make it big in high tech. Apparently it takes whiskers.”

So the magazine organized a contest: The Silicon Valley Beard-off. It pulled together a spread of eight unshaven execs and invited a panel of three distinguished judges to choose the best beard of the bunch. You can see the results here.

You can also vote for your favorite among the four semi-finalists: Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs, Flickr’s (YHOO) Stewart Butterfield, Pixar’s (DIS) Ed Catmull, and Oracle’s (ORCL) Larry Ellison. Click here.

The leader in early returns — with 53% of votes cast as of Wednesday morning — is Steve Jobs.

Vox populi is clearly at variance with Fortune’s judges. They didn’t vote Apple’s grizzled CEO past the first round, in which he edged out Steve Wozniak.

We have a launch window for the 3G iPhone.

Around this time last year, AT&T Mobility sent a memo to employees asking them not to schedule vacations between June 15 and July 15. The company wanted all hands on deck for the launch of the original iPhone. The thing arrived on Friday, June 29, in the dead center of the vacation-free zone.

Well, they’ve done it again. With the 3G iPhone widely expected to be released in June, AT&T (T) sent a similar memo, which has fallen into the hands of The Boy Genius Report. It’s copied below in full. As you can see, the launch window this year seems to be between June 15 and July 12, with a midpoint during the weekend that starts Friday, June 27.

Apple’s (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference runs from June 9 to June 13, with a Steve Jobs keynote expected (but not yet scheduled) on the first or second day. Friday June 27 is two days before the anniversary of the launch of the first iPhone. Mark your calendars.

The memo:

AT&T Mobility

Vacation Schedules

To: All Employees

Last year at this time we asked that all vacations be scheduled before June 15 or after July 15, to ensure adequate store staffing and to give everyone an equal opportunity to benefit from an exciting product launch. Thanks to your hard work, we experienced excellent sales during the mid-summer period. This year, the numbers you produced in 2007 will be hard to beat; but as a business, we must rise to the challenge, and make every effort to exceed last year’s sales results. Your management team is counting on you!

We’ll meet the challenge “head-on” by providing an exciting Summer Promotional Launch to enable your sales to soar. We again anticipate heavier than normal customer traffic in our stores, providing an excellent earning opportunity for every front line retail sales consultant (RSC) in company owned retail stores.

To ensure proper staffing during this period, Sales personnel planning to take approved time off are encouraged to schedule their vacations before June 15 or after July 12 to participate in the heavy selling period

Previously approved vacation will be allowed where voluntary rescheduling is not feasible

No additional vacation will be approved for 6/15 – 7/12

If customer traffic is manageable, there may be an opportunity to approve vacation toward the end of the period. Managers will communicate updates as they become available.

It was only seven months ago that we celebrated the 10 year anniversary of what may be Michael Dell’s most famous quote. Asked on Oct. 6, 1997, what he would do if he were in charge of Apple, he told a crowd of several thousand technology execs gathered in Orlando:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” (link)

The irony, as we noted last October, was that Apple’s (AAPL) market cap was then double that of Dell, Inc. (DELL). Since then, Apple’s value has gone on to triple and, last week, quadruple Dell’s. Here, thanks to MacDailyNews, are the market cap milestones:

• Jan. 13, 2006 Apple passes Dell: $72.13 billion vs. $71.97 billion
• July 27, 2007 Apple doubles Dell: $127.81 billion vs. $63.65 billion
• Dec. 6, 2007 Apple triples Dell: $165.66 billion vs. $54.42 billion
• May 1, 2008 Apple quadruples Dell: $158.66 billion vs. $38.97 billion

By week’s end, Apple was worth 4.04 Dells.

Michael Dell, however, is still worth 3.01 Steve Jobs, according to the latest list of the richest Americans:

• Dell’s net worth: $17.2 billion
• Jobs’ net worth: $5.7 billion

And according to IDC, Dell is America’s No. 1 PC maker, with a 30.9% U.S. market share, while Apple is No. 4 with 6%.

So why the big difference in market capitalization? Apple’s track record of innovation, integration and customer service has something to do with it, but investors pay even more attention to the margins.

• Apple Profit margin: 15.13% Operating margin: 19.28%
• Dell Profit margin: 4.82% Operating margin: 5.91% [Source: Yahoo Finance]

In other words, Dell sells a lot more machines, but Apple makes way more profit on each machine it sells.

Having topped Forbes‘ list of the U.S.’s highest-paid CEOs last year with a total compensation of $646 million — thanks almost entirely to restricted stock grants that vested in 2006 — Apple’s (AAPL) $1-a-year CEO dropped to No. 120 this year. Total 2007 compensation: a mere $14.6 million.

Steve Jobs doesn’t even make the magazine’s list of the top 10 highest-paid tech CEOs. Oracle’s (ORCL) Larry Ellison, America’s highest-paid CEO, is also No. 1 on the tech list (total 2007 compensation: $192.9 million).

Among tech CEOs, Jobs came in at No. 11, despite the fact that his company is one of the most efficient in terms of return on investment, delivering 99.3% in fiscal year 2007, second only to MEMC (126.1%).

You can page slowly through pictures of the top 12 technology CEOs at Forbes.com (link), or take them in at a glance below:

1. Larry Ellison, Oracle: $192.9 million
2. Nabeeb Gareel, MEMC Electronic Materials: $79.6 million
3. John Chambers, Cisco: $54.8 million
4. Mark Hurd, HP: $27.6 million
5. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA: $24.6 million
6. Samual Palmisano, IBM: $24.3 million
7. Wendell Weeks, Corning: $22.6 million
8. Joseph Tucci, EMC: $20 million
9. William Sullivan, Agilent: $17.4 million
10. Paul Otellini, Intel: $16.3 million
11. Steve Jobs, Apple: $14.6 million
12. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun: $13.5 million

Methodology: “Forbes compiled the list by calculating the overall compensation for the past year for executives, factoring in salary, cash bonuses, vested stock grants, stock gains and exercised stock options.”

Not for the first time, Time Magazine has included Apple’s (AAPL) CEO in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Here’s what Barbara Kiviat, who wrote the item, had to say:

“Steve Jobs is great at playing the countercultural icon. He’s a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. There are righteous battles to fight, and with Macs and iTunes and iPhones, Jobs fights them, taking on the entrenched megaliths that try to dictate our tastes in computers and music and mobile phones.

But don’t let the black mock turtleneck and denim trousers fool you. More than anything else, Jobs is a canny CEO who knows how to sell product. Steve Wozniak was the technical genius behind the first Apple computer; Jobs saw the marketability. He now presides over a company with $24 billion in annual sales and 22,000 employees. Jobs, 53, is revered by tech and design geeks, but the world’s business-school students may have the most to learn from him. Apple’s stock has shot up more than 70% over the past year, thanks to Jobs’ strategy of focusing on his most profitable customers and coming up with new things to sell them — the ultra-thin MacBook Air most recently — rather than just chasing more market share.

Jobs may be a celebrity CEO, but he doesn’t jump out of airplanes or traipse around Africa with bundles of cash. He is always in character and always on message, so much so that when late-night TV parodies him, he’s invariably rolling out some new iProduct. Jobs gets called mercurial, egomaniacal, a micromanager. If that sounds a little like a CEO doing his job, maybe that’s because he is — and a mighty fine one.”

The news that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes let slip in a conference call on Wednesday — that from now on Warner Bros. movies would come out as video on demand the same day as the DVD — turns out to be bigger than he let on.

Apple on Thursday announced that not only would Warner Bros. titles be available for purchase on the iTunes store the same day and date as DVD release, but so too would movies from 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios (DIS), Paramount Pictures (VIA), Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SNE), Lionsgate, Image Entertainment and First Look Studios. (press release)

Even before the full extent of the deal was revealed, analysts were talking about the consequences for the DVD business. “Time Warner To Help Kill Off DVD Rentals” was the headline of Michael Learmonth’s piece in Silicon Alley Insider Thursday morning.

What does all this mean? It means Time Warner is finally ready to start weaning itself from DVD sales, which have been Hollywood’s biggest revenue source for years.

It also means that if Blockbuster — or Netflix, for that matter — doesn’t figure out electronic delivery, it is toast. And it means that Sony and Toshiba just incinerated a pile of money in a useless DVD format war. (link)

What convinced the Hollywood studios to cut this deal with Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs? According to Time Warner’s (TWX) Bewkes, the company had been experimenting with “day and date” video on demand (VOD) release for several months and found that DVD rentals only fell by 3 to 5 percent and sales of DVDs actually increased. Since VOD is so much cheaper than printing and distributing discs, it looked like a no-brainer.

“Taking a customer and moving that person over from rental-physical over moving them to VOD day-and-date is like a 60 to 70 percent margin instead of a 20 to 30,” Mr. Bewkes said, according to the New York Times. “So it’s about a three-to-one trade.” (link)

Among the titles immediately available for download on iTunes: “Juno,” “Cloverfield,” “I Am Legend,” “There Will Be Blood,” “American Gangster,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.”

What is Steve Jobs waiting for?

It’s already April, and Apple has yet to start making large-scale purchase orders for NAND flash memory for 2008, according to a report issued Monday by iSuppli Corp. By this time last year, Apple had already ordered huge quantities of the stuff.

Apple (AAPL) looms large in the NAND flash market. According to iSuppli, it is the world’s third-largest OEM buyer of NAND flash, which it uses in iPods, iPhones and solid state disk drives for the MacBook Air.

Based on the lack of new large-scale orders — and on a February iSuppli report that Apple had “slashed” its expected 2008 flash growth forecast — iSuppli cut its own forecast of revenue growth for NAND flash memory this year by about two-thirds on Monday. iSuppli had previously forecast NAND revenue to rise 27 percent to $17.9 billion. It now expects revenue reach $15.2 billion in 2008, up only 9 percent from 2007’s $13.9 billion.

iSuppli had earlier predicted that Apple’s spending on memory would jump 32% this year to $1.6 billion. The firm now projects the company’s spending will increase only 12% to $1.4 billion in 2008, up from $1.2 billion last year.

iSuppli’s February report of “slashed” orders had surprised Apple watchers and didn’t help its share price, which had dropped 60 points from its December high of over $200 per share.

But the market seems to have shaken off iSuppli’s latest report, perhaps because demand for Apple’s products is so high. Apple can’t make iPhones fast enough to supply demand in the U.S. (see here) and interest in the next-generation 3G iPhones seems to grow every week. Meanwhile, Apple’s MacBooks are moving briskly and even iPods sales, which had slacked off, have picked up in the wake of the shuffle’s February price cut.

If Steve Jobs plans to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, let’s hope he’s got the flash to put in them.

It’s all the talk on tech and music blogs: The report in Wednesday’s Financial Times that Apple (AAPL) is negotiating with the big music companies for a deal that would give customers free access to the entire iTunes music library. (link)

In exchange for what? There are several answers to that question in the FT account, and that’s the problem.

In one model, customers would pay a premium — up to $100 extra — for an iPod that would have “all you can drink” access to the iTunes library for the lifetime of the device. This is similar to the “comes with music” deal Nokia (NOK) struck with Universal Music last year. The Nokia deal, however, is for streaming music to a phone. The iPod deal would require download access and some kind of digital rights management scheme to prevent a user from siphoning off the entire library and putting it on a big hard drive.

In the other model, customers would pay a monthly subscription fee of $7 or $8 dollars for full streaming access to the library — like RealNetwork’s (RNWK) Rhapsody.com service — and the right to keep 40 to 50 tracks per year. This model would only work with the iPhone, which is sold on a subscription basis.

According to the Financial Times, the negotiators are haggling over the price. Nokia is reported to be offering up to $80 per handset to Universal. Apple, two sources told the FT, is offering only $20 — which happens to be roughly what the average iPod owner spends at the iTunes store today.

“If that’s really the only thing keeping this from happening, then this is a done deal,” writes Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider, echoing much of the commentary this morning that likes the way this deal sounds.

“I won’t speculate whether the rumor is correct or not but I can say that it does make sense,” writes Michael Gartenburg.

Color me skeptical, and not just because Steve Jobs has repeatedly attacked the idea of “renting music.” People rent movies and watch them once or twice, he believes, but they listen to their favorite music over and over and they want to own it.

Jobs, of course, might change his tune if he could find a way to make subscription services as simple and transparent as the 99-cent-per-song download model that he’s stuck with since he opened the iTunes store.

But the business models outlined in the FT story are anything but transparent. In fact, as MG Siegler points out in VentureBeat, the store and service the FT describes is more complicated than many of Apple’s chief competitors’.

“Does Apple,” Siegler asks, “really want to mess with a good thing?” (link)

Here’s one way to get moved to the head of the genius line: complain about your problem on a radio show carried by 650 stations across the U.S.

On Feb. 12, Rush Limbaugh, a self-proclaimed “big Mac guy,” talked about two problems he was having with his computers after upgrading to Leopard — one with how his mail was getting backed up in Time Machine and the other with seeing his various “top of the line Mac Pros” through Back to My Mac.

“I’ve been very patient with my Apple rep, with my developer rep, and they’re working hard on it,” he said on the air, “but nothing gets done! All use file reports and get lost in the Apple bureaucratic system.”

“Do you think I ought to make an appeal, a direct appeal to Steve Jobs from behind the Golden EIB Microphone?” he asked his staff, one of whom joked: “His reply is going to be, ‘Mr. Limbaugh. Do us a favor and endorse Windows’.” (link)

We don’t know what, if anything, Apple’s (AAPL) CEO actually said, but Limbaugh got the TLC he craved. He reported yesterday that both his problems have been solved “through the diligent work of an engineer that Apple assigned my IT guy.”

I’m not going to mention the name of the engineer. I would love to, but if I did, this guy would be taking heat for the rest of his career from people for helping me. But they were very cooperative, and I think it’s going to end up having to be a system-wide fix, which is good, because it’s been discovered. (link)

There may be a patch for the e-mail problem in a future operating system upgrade, Limbaugh said, suggesting modestly that Apple might even name it after him.