Apple confirmed iPhone ship date Late June

Reuters reported that Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said on Wednesday the company’s iPhone is on track to ship in late June.

Oppenheimer also said that the gross margin of 35 percent the company turned in during its most recent quarter was “not sustainable” because component costs are not expected to remain as low as they had been.

“We look forward to shipping the iPhone in late June and are very excited,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Apple’s iPhone has been surrounded in a thick cloud of hype ever since it was announced in early January. The phone was announced at MacWorld 2007 in January, but it was all the talk at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas which was being held at the same time.

From the beginning, Apple said that the iPhone would ship in June of this year and would be a Cingular Wireless (AT&T Wireless) exclusive phone. Late last month, a rumor about iPhone release date June 11 was reported by CNET. The launch would coincide with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco which is slated to run from June 11 through June 15.

Things took an even more interesting turn when Apple announced that it would delay the launch of its OS X 10.5 Leopard operating from June until October. At the time, the iPhone was blamed for the delay. “iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS(R) X team,” said Apple on April 12.

Insiders at the Company manufacturing the Apple iPhone claim that iPhone quality problems are causing concen to the extent that the phone may be delayed to end of June or early July.

Hopefully Apple iPhope will ship on time as their CFO’ s words.