• San Jose Mercury News, Thursday, September 10, 2009 10:32 AM

Troy Wolverton says that Steve Jobs' appearance at Apple's press event yesterday was the only real surprise and that the updates to its music products were "modest." More notable, perhaps, is what Apple didn't do: It did not introduce a tablet computer, it did not kill the iPod classic, it did not start to sell Beatles tunes in the iTunes music store, it did not introduce a music streaming service and it did not radically update the design of any of the iPod models. As rumored.

The biggest update, Wolverton says, was adding a digital video camera to the iPod Nano. Analysts tell him that the weakened economy makes it hard to sell consumers on anything new anyway.

"I don't expect anyone to bring out bleeding edge [products] in a market like this," says Mike McGuire, a Gartner analyst. Indeed, Apple slashed prices of many of its iPods in the spirit of the hard times.

Jobs, who acknowledged that he had a liver transplant five months ago, looked gaunt and thin and stepped gingerly around the stage. "I'm vertical," he joked, "and I'm back at Apple." And, in the end, his presentation was "vintage Jobs," Patrick May and Wovlerton write in a sidebar.

"For 30 years, he's created products that have inspired and changed people's lives," says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. "So seeing him back up there tells everyone that the party's still going on." ;

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