Ask Apple (AAPL) what’s in the iPhone and they’ll treat it like a black box, albeit one powered by Apple’s special brand of technological magic. Or maybe elves. Or magic beans.

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While it’s true that Apple has significantly grown its share of the desktop operating system market since the release of Windows Vista in November of 2006, the company’s market share remains below 10 percent, and it actually dropped in the first quarter of 2009, according to Gartner’s Worldwide PC Shipment report.

To most observers, it’s fairly clear that Vista’s failings gave people a reason to take a fresh look at the Mac.

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Well, take a deep breath: the tech sector starts off the new year with a bang this week, with the Steve Jobs-less Macworld in San Francisco and the Bill Gates-less CES coming up in Las Vegas. I’ll be at Moscone West for the Macworld keynote by Apple (AAPL) marketing exec Phil Schiller Tuesday morning; later in the week, Tiernan Ray and I will be covering all the news from CES. Meanwhile, here are some tidbits from the weekend’s papers:

The U.S. government is running out of cash for its program to subsidize the costs of digital television boxes, according to an AP story in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

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Whether or not the Macworld show next month–Apple’s (AAPL) last, it has announced–brings exciting new gadgets, the new year could see some rising numbers for sales of the company’s iPhone and its attendant software programs. Several authors of top-selling programs for the iPhone, distributed through Apple’s online “App Store,” report a surge in sales of their programs on Christmas Day last week. To take just one example, the author of the current top-selling application for the iPhone, iFart (yes, it’s a version of the classic fart-machine sound effects box for the iPhone) reports on his blog that sales of the program, which costs 99 cents, rose on Christmas day to 38,927 from 19,520 units the day before.

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Apple Inc. (AAPL) set off shock waves Tuesday by announcing Steve Jobs will not speak at what the company said would be its final appearance at the Macworld trade show. The news sent the company’s stock downward, and raised questions about whether Mr. Jobs had new health problems or some new products were not ready.

But another question is likely to persist after the debate dies down: How well could Apple keep up the pace of new products without its iconic chief executive?

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Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina. I know this because Jobs and Tina came to the Macworld magazine dinner party I put together at the Sutter 500 restaurant to celebrate the success of the first expo, and of the first year of the Mac itself.

There were about 20 of us at the dinner, including the late, great Chronicle columnist Herb Caen; Will Hearst, then editor and publisher of the competing San Francisco Examiner; John Sculley, CEO of Apple (AAPL); John Warnock, founder of the software company Adobe (ADBE); and Ted Leonsis, the AOL executive, who these days owns the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey team.

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Tuesday’s news that Apple had announced that Steve Jobs wouldn’t be appearing at Macworld Expo and that the company would stop exhibiting at the show after 2009 came as a shock. I’m stunned that Apple has taken a 25-year-old event that has been the single best meeting place for the entire community of users and vendors of Apple-related products and treated it like a piece of garbage stuck to the bottom of its shoe. But I’m not really surprised: Apple has been leading up to this moment for a long time now.

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The first thing that’s coming to so many minds in the wake of Apple’s announcement that CEO Steve Jobs won’t be making his customary keynote address at the Macworld Expo on Jan. 6, is the condition of Jobs’s health. I don’t think his health has anything to do with it. Though I think the speculation that has come to surround his appearance in recent years is a minor factor in the decision.

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Wow. Wow. Wow. Over the last few days, folks noticed that the traditional announcement that Steve Jobs would kick off IDG’s Macworld Expo with a keynote speech hadn’t come yet, and began wondering if he might be a no-show–as unlikely as that seemed. Sometimes, the unlikely is nonetheless reality: Apple has announced that marketing head Phil Schiller will keynote, and that it’s pulling out of Macworld Expo altogether as of 2010.

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Back when the National Security Agency still had a low profile, before it became the villainous adversary of action movies or the subject of congressional inquiries, there was a quip amongst the agency’s employees that the abbreviation NSA stood for “Never Say Anything.” But shift just one letter in that abbreviation and you’ll get “NDA,” the document that’s beginning to make Apple look more and more like the über-secretive government agency.

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It’s not often I write something completely positive about Apple … but there are exceptions to every rule, as I’m about to prove. As Thursday’s iPhone special event approached, I was looking forward to it, but with some trepidation. As a user who has had third-party applications on his iPhone almost since such a thing was first possible, I had concerns that Apple wouldn’t quite understand how well this system had been working. But now, having read the coverage of Apple’s briefing, I am happy to admit I was completely off-base with my concerns. I think Apple has hit a proverbial home run here, with everything from the enterprise support to the actual SDK to the approach it plans to take for distribution. Here’s why I think Apple did everything right…

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