Apple has announced that next month's Macworld Expo will be its last. And in an additional snub, Steve Jobs won't be giving the keynote - that honour will go to Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing.

The company says that it can reach its customers through Apple Stores and the Internet, and that trade shows are no longer relevant.

The announcement that Jobs will not give the keynote is sure to spark fresh concerns about his health, even if that played no part in the decision to put Schiller on stage in his place.

Alternatively, it implies that Apple doesn't have much to announce in January.

The MacBook family has just been updated, the iMacs probably aren't due for anything other than a speed-bump, the iPod range was refreshed in time for Christmas, and as far as we know the Apple TV is still just a hobby.

Although there have been suggestions that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is progressing well, there is no real prospect of anything other than a technology demonstration at next month's Macworld Expo.

While show organiser IDG is putting on a brave face and saying it is committed to Macworld Expo in 2010, Apple's pull-out must put the future of the event in question. After all, when Apple withdrew its support for Macworld New York, the fate of that Expo was sealed.

And on a different subject, Mac OS X 10.5.6 was released this week with an extensive list of bug fixes and security patches.

But there seems to be more reports of installation problems than usual - if you haven't already updated, it may be wise to download the standalone installer (or even the combo installer) rather than relying on Software Update.

So you thought OpenCL - one of the headline features of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - was just an Apple thing? Wrong - it's being promulgated by an industry body with plenty of well-known supporters.

The idea of OpenCL is to provide a standard set of interfaces for developers that want to tap the power of modern graphics chips (and other components such as digital signal processors) for tasks that require a lot of calculations.

OpenCL provides just that, using an extended subset of the C programming language.

And OpenCL has now been adopted by the same organisation that backs OpenGL - Khronos Group.

Backing by big names including Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, as well as Apple, ARM, Ericsson. Freescale, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Texas Instruments suggests the new standard will be widely supported.

The importance of OpenCL is that it allows developers to create software that takes advantage of all of the processing power in a system without having to know ahead of time exactly what hardware will be available.

Amazingly, Khronos Group took OpenCL from proposal to promulgation in less than six months - quite an achievement given the number of companies involved, especially where competitors are concerned.

The Simpsons' episode featuring "Mapple" recently broadcast in the US attracted plenty of attention from Mac fans and haters alike.

From the MyCube that glows to show it's switched off, through MyPhonies (white earbuds so you can pretend to be a MyPhone owner) to the 'live announcement' from Steve Mobbs, there was plenty to smile about regardless of how you feel about the company being mocked.

Unless you love Apple and have absolutely no sense of humour, that is.

My favourite parts were the spoof of the legendary 1984 advert, and Mobbs' line that "I know our posters say 'Think Differently' but our real slogan is 'No Refunds'."

Maybe I'm easily pleased.

If you haven't seen the Mypods and Boomsticks episode, it's available on Hulu (if the Hulu servers think your computer is in the US), or you may be able to find it elsewhere on the net.

Whether you or I like the idea of DRM is neither here nor there - if copyright owners get it into their heads that they will only release certain content if it is 'protected', the rest of the chain has two choices: play along, or don't play at all. Apple played, but not according to the rules.

If studios opt to impose HDCP on some of their high-definition content, there's not a lot Apple can do about it. And as we've seen with music, rightsholders can't always resist using DRM as a way of keeping Apple 'in its place.' (Look at the labels that sell unprotected tracks anywhere except the iTunes Store.)

You could argue that Apple should have avoided the DisplayPort and its related DRM technology, but that would most likely have meant that HD movies would not be available from iTunes for playback on a Mac.

But the real mistake Apple made was that a flaw in QuickTime meant some standard definition content wouldn't play back on a non-HDCP/non-DPCP monitor connected to a current-model MacBook, MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. And that's the vast majority of monitors and projectors in use today.

Apple has now fixed that problem with QuickTime 7.5.7, but the glitch has left a nasty taste in some customers' mouths. The last thing you want to tell a paying customer is that they're not allowed to use the content they've forked out good money for.

And thanks to the Internet, that ill feeling has spread to a much larger part of the customer base than those actually affected by the issue.

When Apple revealed its plans for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at the WWDC in June this year, the word was that it would ship in about a year.

So far, there has been little or no reason to expect it any sooner. But when Jordan Hubbard, director of Apple's Unix Technology Group spoke at the Large Installation System Administration conference last week, he revealed that Snow Leopard should ship in the first quarter of 2009.

Just so there's no confusion, he clearly meant the first calendar quarter - not the first financial quarter. A table from his presentation [PDF available here] shows 10.6 being released "14+ months" after 10.5's October 2007 debut.

This suggests we are almost certain to see a feature-complete version of Snow Leopard at Macworld Expo in January.

You can bet that Apple will be working hard to maximise the splash by releasing 10.6 on the same day, but I suspect most users would rather wait a little longer if that's what is necessary to minimise the number of bug fixes in the inevitable 10.6.1.

Snow Leopard is expected to work only on Intel-based Macs. While Apple is positioning it as an 'under the hood' revision for quality and performance, the promised support for Exchange 2007 in Mail, Address Book and iCal will be significant for many business users.

Where's the extra performance coming from? Snow Leopard will provide "unrivaled support for multicore systems", support for a theoretical 16T of RAM, a mechanism for developers to use the computing power of modern GPUs for non-graphics calculations, a more efficient version of QuickTime, and a faster implementation of JavaScript.