The distant roar of the Lion is getting louder, that’s for sure -- but no one outside of Apple really knows for sure when the beast will finally be uncaged, only sometime in July. While everyone plays the guessing game, at least one rumor suggests it could be less than a week away.

Three Guys and a Podcast is reporting that Apple may uncage Mac OS X Lion to the public as early as next Wednesday, July 6 and has even pegged the specific time of 9am PST for the launch. The news comes direct “from our source in the San Francisco Bay Area,” although there’s no indication that might be someone who actually works at Apple or just some homeless guy on the street, so readers are advised to take this and other rumors with a grain of salt as usual.

“One particular item of interest about this news is that with OS X Lion being an online-release-only, Apple can wait until the 11th hour to release new OS,” T-GAAP notes. “They don't have to first lock it down, then press it onto DVDs, then box it, then ship to their hundreds of stores and through distribution in order to meet a certain publicly announced launch date. With an online release, Apple just needs to upload the final release to their servers and then make it available.”

A good point to be sure, although other rumors have pegged the release for July 19, with refreshed MacBook Airs hitting the street on the same day with OS X Lion already installed. That’s also the same day that Apple will release their quarterly financials, which would make a busy day for the company.

We’d surely be happy to get the Lion roaring on our own systems in less than a week, so we’ll all have to just wait and see what hits the Mac App Store next Wednesday -- or maybe July 19, you never know…

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