Headlines Matter, and WWDC Dates Are Not Yet ‘Confirmed’ ⇥ macrumors.com

I think MacRumors has one of the best reporting teams around, but I think this story by Joe Rossignol — bearing the headline “WWDC 2019 Dates Confirmed: June 3-7 in San Jose” — misses the mark:

While we were already confident the WWDC 2019 dates would fall on June 3-7, we confirmed with a source that a large annual event of some kind will be taking place during that week at McEnery. Meanwhile, the second and fourth weeks of June are ruled out due to the already-announced O’Reilly Velocity conference on June 10-13 and the Sensors Expo on June 25-27 at McEnery.

In our continued research, we discovered that San Jose requires permitting for large public events such as Apple’s WWDC Bash, which took place at the Discovery Meadow park next to McEnery in 2018.

Following that thread, we unearthed a 2019 events calendar from the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs that lists this year’s WWDC Bash at Discovery Meadow on the evening of Thursday, June 6. The event is named “Team San Jose 2019 WWDC” and is organized by “Apple.” An identical WWDC entry was listed in the Office of Cultural Affairs’ 2018 events calendar for the actual WWDC 2018 Bash.

This is great detective work, but I think the use of the word “confirmed” throughout this article and in the headline is misleading. The dates for WWDC are not confirmed until Apple announces them. At best, all independent evidence points to the first week of June as WWDC week in San Jose.

If you are confident in MacRumors’research, I’d start looking for refundable hotel reservations now. Prices on travel websites are already up compared to yesterday, when I last checked; once Apple announces the dates officially, you know they’ll just keep climbing.