Good things come to those who wait.

Steve Jobs may have disappointed his fan base — and Wall Street — by not having more to offer at Macworld last month. But whether by design or by way of compensation, the folks at Apple (AAPL) have been extra busy in the weeks since.

Last week the company released the new 16 GB iPhone that many Apple watchers had expected to see at Macworld, as well as the 32 GB iPod touch that most had not.

Yesterday it released a major update to Mac OS X Leopard that fixed a slew of bugs and made some cosmetic changes (especially in the dock and stacks) that users had been begging for.

Today we got a two-fer:

• Aperture 2, a major upgrade of Apple’s high-end photo editing and management software, a favorite with professional photographers, and
• Apple TV “Take 2“, the free upgrade that allows movie rentals and direct downloads from the iTunes store. Jobs had promised that it would be available within two weeks of Macworld. It arrived in four.

What’s next? Rumors abound that there will be an Apple event before the end of the month at which the company could reveal everything from the iPhone software developers kit promised for February (but also rumored to be delayed) to $100 price cuts in the iPhone and iPod touch lines.

Given the excitement with which the reinvention of Apple TV was greeted when Steve Jobs announced it two weeks ago at Macworld, it’s surprising how little critical attention has been paid to the fact that the free update he promised to deliver by Tuesday has run into a snag.

The news was slipped into an Apple (AAPL) press release about the Macbook Air that was issued on Wednesday. Apple TV’s second coming is now due “in a week or two” or “within two weeks,” depending which paragraph you read.

Why the delay?

The update, according to the release, is simply “not quite finished.” But that hasn’t stopped outsiders from speculating that there might be more going on.

Could it have something to do with that awkward moment in Jobs’ Macworld keynote when he went to demo Flikr photos on Apple TV and the giant screen went blank? (”I’m afraid Flikr’s not serving up the photos today,” he joked, but you know that inside he was fuming.)

Or could the hang-up be, as Valleywag’s Jordan Golson speculates, some last-minute wrangling with the movie studios? If that’s the case, a week or two may be optimistic.

I’m reminded of Daniel Eran Dilger’s lovesong to the new Apple TV posted in Roughly Drafted last week, in which he praised it as “a full fledged, self contained media computer for watching and ordering Internet content” and bid good riddance to Blockbuster.

With the iPhone now running along smoothly at top speed, Apple now has the opportunity to fire up Apple TV as its fourth engine [of growth]. This time, the professional naysayers only have a couple weeks to disgorge their rivers of fear, uncertainty, and doubt before Take Two hits the public’s hands and shows up their analysis as the stupefying nonsense that it is. (link)

Apparently Apple saw fit to give the naysayers another week to two.

Sometimes you have to listen very closely when Steve Jobs promises something.

When Apple’s (AAPL) CEO introduced movie rentals at Macworld two weeks ago, he demonstrated how films downloaded through iTunes could be sent with one click to an iPod, iPhone or iPod touch.

Then, according to my notes, he said something about “current generation iPods.”

Those three words have got a lot of people on Apple’s discussion boards hopping mad today. It turns out that fifth-generation video iPods purchased as recently as five months ago won’t play those iTunes movie rentals — and not because of any hardware deficiency. Current generation iPods, per the footnote in Apple’s press release here, include only the “iPod classic, iPod nano with video and iPod touch.”

“This is bogus!!!!!” writes user ninzan on one of at least a half-dozen threads devoted to the topic. “I was all up on apple rental now that I find out that I have been locked out i feel like a moronic apple groupie. My 5g Ipod video is apparently too old and my new itouch did not come with video output. i’m screwed”

The only recourse, it seems, is to ask for your rental fee back. According to reader reports, Apple has started to issue refunds.

What’s going on?

Bryan Gardiner at Wired called around and by yesterday had come up with several theories.

Forrester’s James McQuivey thinks it may be a strategy of planned obsolescence — a ploy by Apple to get users to buy new iPods.

Yankee Group’s Carl Howe thinks it might have something to do with the clock-resetting trick some users have discovered for extending the life of a 30-day, 24-hour rental.

The most plausible explanation, to my ear, comes from The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Christina Warren. She points out here that fifth-generation iPods had a simple analog video output feature (replaced with authentication chip-equipped composite and component AV on the classic, touch and nano with video) that would have allowed rented content to be easily copied. Closing this so-called video hole may have been a requirement imposed on Apple by the movie studios.

Of course, nobody bought a video iPod before September in order to play movies rented on iTunes — an option that didn’t exist at the time. Still, for millions of video iPod owners (disclaimer: I’m one of them), it’s annoying to be so close and yet so far. Clearer disclosure would have been nice. And a refund of a few bucks to users who rented before they discovered the fine print seems like the least Apple could do.

SAN FRANCISCO — Steve Jobs gave it his best, delivering a new must-have gadget called the MacBook Air, deals with a full house of compliant Hollywood studios, and more bells and whistles on his existing products and services in a 90-minute speech than most technology companies do in a year.

But Wall Street was not impressed; shares of Apple (AAPL) got hammered, falling more than 10 points during the course of the keynote despite the impressive sales figures Jobs rattled off: 4 million iPhones, 5 million copies of the Leopard operating system, 4 billion songs, 125 million TV shows, 7 million movies.

And although the crowd of 2,500 that packed San Francisco’s Moscone West ooohed and ahhhed at all the right moments, there was a audible murmur of letdown when Jobs ended the presentation not with his patented “one more thing,” but with a couple musical numbers from songwriter Randy Newman.

Still, the performance was vintage Jobs. He showed genuine delight when he untied the little red string on a yellow interoffice envelope to reveal what he described as the world’s thinnest notebook computer: .16 inches on one end and .76 on the other — thinner on its thickest end, as he happily pointed out, than the comparable Sony (SNE) ultraportable is on its thinnest. Even at $1,799, the Air will be “the must have product of 2008,” predicts Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenburg. “All the cool kids are going to want one.”

And he was clearly in his element demonstrating the features of the newly configured Apple TV, which can now wirelessly download DVD- and HD-quality video without going through a computer. Starting in two weeks, anybody who wants to spend $2.99 to $4.99 on the iTunes Store will be one-step closer to the video lover’s idea of Nirvana: the ability to watch anywhere, at any time, any movie ever made. (Or at least the 1,000 movies currently in Apple’s library, a number Jobs promises will quickly grow as Apple re-engineers the movies from participating studios.) Netflix (NFLX) should be nervous.

“This is potentially extremely disruptive,” says Gartenburg. “This could do to Hollywood what the iPod and iTunes did for the music industry.”

Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies agrees. “The biggest news today is that Apple was able to get support from all the major studios,” he says. “It shows that Jobs is still the master broker.”

Media analyst James McQuivey of Forrester Research begs to differ. Apple needed Hollywood to put content on its video-ready hardware more than Hollywood needed Apple, he says. Renting content is one thing. Selling it for $1.99 (and forgoing all that ad revenue broadcast TV generates) is quite another; that’s why Universal is making its movies available on iTunes even as NBC Universal pulls its TV shows.

Part of the air of disappointment that fell over Macworld Expo when the keynote was over was due to the fact that although Jobs delivered on some of the rumors, there were no major surprises, and most of the announcements anticipated in the Apple blogs proved to be wishful thinking. There was no new 16 GB iPhone, no demonstrations of 3rd party iPhone apps, no Blu-ray announcement, no new display screens, no Beatles on iTunes.

And even in the products Jobs did deliver, there were almost as many questions as there were answers.

How much, for example, does the 64 GB solid-state version of the MacBook Air cost? Jobs didn’t say and none of the Apple reps on the floor seemed to know. (The answer can be found on the Apple Store: $3,098 with the high-end 1.8 GHz chip, a whopping $1,299 premium over the standard 80 GB hard drive model.) How do you replace the battery on the MacBook? (It turns out that, as with the iPhone and iPod, you can’t — it’s sealed into the gadget.) Where’s the Ethernet plug? (There isn’t one; you have to buy a USB to Ethernet adaptor.)

But for all that, it was an impressive show, delivering enough innovation to keep the competition at bay for another 12 months. “It goes to show,” says Gartenburg, “that even when Apple doesn’t deliver a tsunami, it can still make waves.”

For more detail, see Jon Fortt’s live blog at fortune.com/bigtech.

[Photo: Jon Fortt]

The Macworld Conference & Expo, Silicon Valley’s largest technology trade show, opens Monday. But the moment everyone is waiting for comes Tuesday morning, when Steve Jobs makes his annual keynote address at San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Jobs has set a high bar for himself. At Macworld 2006, he introduced the first Intel (INTC)-based Macs — sparking a burst of sales that nearly doubled Apple’s (AAPL) market share from roughly 4% to something approaching 8% (link). At Macworld 2007 he unveiled not just the all-but-forgotten Apple TV, but also the iPhone — a device that in nearly everybody’s book turned out to be the machine of the year.

What can Jobs do to top that?

There’s no shortage of speculation. The Apple rumor machinery has grown so elaborate that for the second year in a row, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa has published a keynote Bingo card (available in PDF format here and in iPhone format here), with boxes to be filled in as Jobs makes his announcements, introduces his guests and trots out his trademark rhetorical flourishes. (The rules of the game are spelled out here.)

Nobody has yet shouted out “Bingo!” in middle of a Steve Jobs presentation — a moment brilliantly anticipated in IBM’s buzzword Bingo TV ad (link) — but this could be the year.

Some of Siracusa’s boxes are obviously more important than others. A couple (Mac Pro and Xserve) were preemptively filled last week, and there are a few key possibilities that he missed. Watch especially for:

• A Skinny MacBook. Probably the leading candidate for Jobs’ one-more-thing moment, it’s already been named — Macbook air, thin, nano and mini — and imagined in PhotoShop (see here, for example) by bloggers who should know better. Likely specs: 12 to 13-inch. LED backlit screen, under 3 lbs., half as thick as today’s MacBooks, 32, 64 or even 128GB solid-state flash drive, priced around $1,600.
• iPhone updates. A bump in capacity from 8GB to 16GB and maybe 32GB is expected, as well as a preview of the software developers toolkit (SDK) promised for February; we might even get a few demos from developers, like EA, who were seeded with the SDK last fall. A 3G iPhone and a Newton-type tablet are reported to be in the works, but not yet ready for prime time.
• Movie rentals. This is the item Hollywood is following most closely. It’s been widely reported that Fox and Disney are likely to make movies available on iTunes for overnight rental (at $3 to $5 for 24 hours) or for purchase for roughly the price of a shrink-wrapped DVD. If, as rumored, Paramount, Lions Gate and Warner Bros join them, the flood of fresh video content could breath new life into the Apple TV. (The Associated Press reported Sunday that Netflix (NFLX), anticipating such a move by Apple, will offer unlimited monthly video streaming.)
• DRM-free Music. Having famously championed the cause with his February 2007 Thoughts on Music memo, it would be surprising — and disappointing — if Jobs did not use this opportunity to announce a significant expansion of the DRM-free offerings in the iTunes Store, especially after the last of the major labels announced last week that they were putting their music on Amazon.com (AMZN) without copy protection.
• Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008. No surprises here, since the reviews are already in, but an excuse for what should be the most lavish after-hours party of the show.
• The Beatles. It’s about time. Just in case, Yoko Ono’s John Lennon Educational Tour Bus mobile recording studio is making the trip from its Las Vegas unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show to be at Macworld. A few hours after Jobs’ speech, there’s a press reception in the bus that’s co-sponsored by Apple.

You already see the flashbulbs popping, right? But is it enough? Apple’s marketing machinery is like a shark that must keep swimming or die. Even if nearly every square on the Bingo card were to be filled on Tuesday, would Jobs have delivered the kind of innovation and buzz the faithful have come to expect?

And then there’s Wall Street to consider. Apple was the high-flying tech stock of year, its share prices having more than doubled in 2007. But as a CNNMoney headline put it on Friday, “What’ve you done for me lately?” The stock fell nearly 30 points over the last two weeks, which could be taken as a measure of traders’ uncertaintly. (Or it could just be a well-timed pause to set up the Macworld effect, the short-term bump tech share prices often enjoy after a Steve Jobs’ keynote.)

No matter how high the bar, Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg is confident that Jobs will clear it. “This is a company that thinks in terms of strategy,” he says. “Do I think they’ll deliver something as disruptive as the iPhone? No. You don’t achieve that kind of disruption every week; it would be tantamount to getting into a whole new industry. But somehow Jobs always manages to meet expectations, even if the expectations are different.”

To find out how different, tune in Tuesday for Fortune senior writer Jon Fortt live blogging from the keynote at fortune.com/bigtech, video coverage from CNNMoney.com and our post-keynote analysis here on Tuesday afternoon.

As Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster walked the floors of the 2008 Consumer Electronics show he, like many other attendees, found himself thinking about Apple (AAPL) and Steve Jobs.

“While Apple was not at the show,” he writes today in a report to clients, “the company’s impact is felt at CES.”

Signs of the company’s influence, he says, were evident in three broad areas:

• Hardware design. “The simple, industrial design that began with the iPod and has carried over to Apple’s Macs and the iPhone, is a general trend that we see in CE devices. iMac-like all-in-one desktop computers from Dell and Gateway, for example, are two instances of other device makers following Apple’s lead.”
• Touchscreen devices. “Apple’s iPhone represents a consumer-ready level of maturity for touchscreen devices… Touchscreen device makers like Samsung are following Apple’s lead, but we believe Apple is significantly ahead of other device makers (except perhaps Microsoft).”
• Ecosystem connectivity. “Apple’s closed iTunes+iPod ecosystem has enabled the company to set the bar in terms of hardware and software integration… This year at CES several companies are pushing to catch Apple in terms of connectivity. Such products included the Sandisk Take TV, wireless streamers, and other connected entertainment devices that offer a non-iTunes competitor to Apple’s entertainment ecosystem.”

Like CES 2007, when the buzz of the show was the soon-to-be-unveiled iPhone, much of the talk this week in Las Vegas was about what might be coming next week in San Francisco.

As Munster puts it:

“We expect Apple’s Macworld announcements (1/15) to set the bar for CES ‘09 — in other words, we see Apple as effectively one year ahead of its competition.”

Like the Oscars for the technical categories, which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out ahead of time rather than bog down the major Academy Award presentations, Apple (AAPL) is using this week to introduce new products that Steve Jobs feels aren’t worthy of his keynote at Macworld next week.

Today it announced two of them:

• A new Mac Pro, with two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, a 320GB drive, and up to 4 terabytes of internal storage for photo editors, designers and other memory hogs (starting price: $2,799). See here for press release.
• A new Xserve with a standard single 64-bit 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor, a 80 GB drive, up to 3 terabytes of storage and an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard (starting price: $2,999). See here for press release.

With 1.83 million square feet of floor space to cover, it’s not easy to gather in one place the 600 media representatives who have flocked to Las Vegas for the orgy of marketing excess that is the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show. But in the press lounge on Sunday, Valleywag’s Jordon Golson found 129 reporters and bloggers (they wear different badges this year), and he used the opportunity to take a survey of what machines they were using.

His count: 94 Windows PCs and 35 Macs (including his MacBook Pro). That’s a 27% market share for Apple (AAPL) — considerably higher than the 7.3% reported in the latest Net Applications survey. The numbers are sure to be even more skewed Cupertino’s way when a different subset of the tech press gathers in San Francisco for Macworld next week.

No wonder Apple gets more than its share of ink — and pixels — in the technology press.

[Photo courtesy of CES]

With less than two weeks to go before Steve Jobs’ Jan. 15 keynote, analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research offers his best guess for what Apple’s (AAPL) CEO might have up his sleeve at Macworld Expo 2008. In a note to clients issued this morning, Wu predicts:

• Blu-ray. Citing unnamed sources, Wu says that Apple will outline an HD strategy that backs Sony’s Blu-ray format over the HD-DVD standard favored by Microsoft. (Although Wu hedges his bets and suggests that Apple might also use a combo Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive.)
• Subnotebook. Wu says Apple will re-enter the subnotebook space (nothing new there) but adds that Jobs may call the new machine the MacBook mini or MacBook slim. Any preferences?
• Movie rentals. Wu points out that the digital movie rental deals expected to be announced at Macworld are a departure driven by necessity, and represent a new business model for Apple. “Whether these movies expire based on time and/or usage is unclear to us,” he writes, “But we do believe that rentals are a significant change in its philosophy.”
• Speed bumps and external HDD: In the category of smaller announcements, Wu is picking up potential news related to speed bumps and or capacity bumps in current Macs and iPhones, and an external HDD storage/dock/streaming device for the Airport Extreme and the new MacBook mini/slim.
• Apple TV. Wu sees two big shortcomings in the current product: 1. no way to connect directly to the Internet for TV and movie content and 2. lack of a TV tuner. “Our sources indicate that AAPL is working on fixing these weaknesses to make Apple TV a much stronger product,” he writes, later in 2008 or perhaps 2009, but not at Macworld 2008.
• 3G iPhone. Coming mid to second-half 2008 at a higher price point, Wu says, allowing Apple to reposition the current iPhone as a “more mainstream” product.

The finished program won’t reach store shelves until after it’s officially unveiled at Apple’s (AAPL) Macworld Expo this month, but the first reviews of Microsoft’s (MSFT) Office 2008 for Mac have landed, and so far they are positive.

The longest and most detailed comes from Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo, who has been playing with a beta version for several weeks and reports that “it’s a smooth ride.” (link)

The briefest comes from Jupiter Research’s Michael Gartenberg, who says “Microsoft got a lot correct in this release and if you use a Macintosh, especially in a corp. environment with Exchange, this is a must-get upgrade.” (link)

The most simplistic review is Walt Mossberg’s at the Wall Street Journal, whose video report is delivered in the tone and pace used by pre-K teachers to speak to five-year-olds (video link). “In my tests, I ran into a few minor glitches,” Walt writes in today’s Journal. “But, generally, the program worked well. (print link)

What you need to know is that this is the first version of Office written for Intel-based Macs (so it’s considerably zippier than the aging and increasingly sluggish Office 2004), and it supports the file types introduced in Office 2007 for Windows.

It comes in several flavors, starting with a $150 Home and Student edition that includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage. The $400 standard edition throws in Automator and Microsoft Server Exchange support. The top-of-the-line $500 Special Edition includes Microsoft Expression Media, formerly iView, for managing a wide variety of media types.

Minimum hardware requirements are a Mac with 1.5GB free on the hard drive running at least OS 10.4.9, with 512MB of RAM and a 500MHz Intel or PowerPC processor.

The biggest drawback to emerge is that unlike earlier versions of Office, this one doesn’t support Visual Basic, the language in which most Excel macros are written. This is likely to dismay business power users.

UPDATE: More reviews have started to roll in. Among them:

• Michael J. Miller’s at PCMag.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
• Danny Gorog at APCMag: First Look: Office 2008 for Mac
• Stephen H. Wildstrom at BusinessWeek: Microsoft and Mac, Happy Together
• Jeffery Battersby at Macworld: First Look: Word 2008
• Tom Negrino at Macworld: First Look: Entourage 2008
• Elsa Wenzel at ZDNet.co.uk: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac: A First Look

And finally, most comprehensively,

• Jonathan M. Gitlin at Ars Technica: First Look: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008