So it finally happened. After an unknown period of back and forth wrangling, Apple evidently caved to the music industry’s demands to institute a multiple tier pricing structure on iTunes. In exchange, the three remaining major recording companies gave Apple the gift they’ve wanted for so long, and that’s the ability to offer their music in a format free of DRM restrictions. A similar deal had been struck with EMI in 2007.

At least you won’t have the pay $1.29 for hit product until April, so place your orders now before it’s too late.

And, no, I don’t believe that Steve Jobs’ illness hurt his legendary powers of persuasion. He’s a realist and this was quite possibly the best deal he could forge.

What this means is that you can do anything you want with the new tracks you buy from iTunes (at least the 80% that have have already been converted to iTunes Plus format), so long as it’s legal. You can play it on any computer, be it a Mac, Windows or Unix/Linux device, so long as the player application supports the industry-standard AAC format. What’s more, you can copy your music library to any digital media player that also speaks AAC.

Even the failed Microsoft Zune!

So did Apple throw their biggest rival a bone, one that’ll salvage Microsoft’s efforts to make the Zune successful? No, I don’t think so.

Before we go further, Microsoft didn’t help itself with that lame programming blunder that rendered 30GB Zunes, the first models shipped, inoperable on New Year’s Eve. It made worldwide headlines, which had to be doubly embarrassing. Yes, I suppose Microsoft’s technical solution, to run it down, recharge it, and not use it again until January 1, 2009 or later, worked for most users.

More than likely, it would happen all over again in four years if the device’s firmware isn’t updated to fix this absurd bug. On the other hand, how many people will even be using those things by 2012? Besides, only the first-generation product is affected. Subsequent Zunes are apparently immune.

Unfortunately, this little exercise only goes to further demonstrate utter Microsoft’s incompetence. They surely demonstrated the fallacy of simply throwing cash at a problem, after spending billions of dollars to develop Windows Vista, only to end up with a bloated, buggy product that many businesses continue to shun. Sure, Microsoft doth protest that the worst bugs were fixed with their SP1 update, and SP2 will do even better. But that is likely too little and too late. Besides, Windows 7 is just around the corner, right? Perhaps it will fix Vista’s wrongs, but can anyone depend on Microsoft for anything that will really work without a lot of pain and agony.

This isn’t to say that Apple’s handling of its newly DRM-free music is pain free. It’s not, by a long shot.

Sure, you can upgrade your existing library. Sure, the 30 cents per track upgrade price isn’t bad, nor is the rate of 60 cents per music video, or 30% of the cost of an entire album. But what if your upgrade list contains several thousand tracks? In this day and age, coming up with all that money at one time isn’t so easy, so what does Apple do? Well, they turn around and make it an all or nothing proposition.

That’s what I said! You can’t just upgrade the albums or tracks you like. It’s take it or leave it. That means that if you bought a few albums that turned out to be duds, you’re stuck! Got a few free tracks along the way? They’re not even on the list.

Talk about a lame upgrade policy! Is this Apple’s fault, or some sort of deal that the music industry forced them to accept in exchange for allowing this sort of transaction in the first place? I don’t pretend to have any answers, but this policy surely fails the logic test big time.

It’s not as if the servers can’t be configured to handle ongoing upgrades. That should be a fairly trivial thing to work out by their programmers. Besides, it makes a whole lot more sense to permit you to pick and choose, because people who might avoid this upgrade because of the sheer expense might be able to afford lesser upgrades and, in the end, actually deliver more sales to Apple — and those greedy music executives.

Now I’m not a huge iTunes customer. I’ve only purchased a small number of albums and single tracks over the years, because I am still old fashioned enough to prefer the actual CD and enough of a purist to require the best possible audio quality. So the impact to me is comparably modest, and I will probably order up the upgrades as soon as all my tracks are present and accounted for.

I also hope that Apple’s policies are clearly not etched in stone. When they do something wrong, they sometimes even admit the fact, and make the appropriate changes. Assuming the ignoramuses in  music industry haven’t tied their hands, I do hope that they’ll soon relent and do the right thing this time too.

Let’s put it this way: Few were anticipating much from Apple VP Philip Schiller when he delivered Apple’s final Macworld Expo keynote. But there were a few essentials that were widely anticipated when it comes to hardware that just weren’t quite realized.

First let’s explore what actually occurred. As rumored, Apple announced a 17-inch unibody version of the MacBook Pro. At $2,799 you get the full package, with 4GB of RAM. But you can upgrade to 8GB and, unlike the lesser models, have it recognize every last bit of memory. The standard Intel Core 2 Duo processor is 2.66GHz, with an upgrade to 2.93GHz for an extra $300.

As with the other MacBook Pros, there are two graphic chips from NVIDIA, including the integrated 9400M and the more powerful 9600M GT with 512MB of memory.

That’s where the resemblances end. You see the 17-inch model also has an optional “antiglare display,” meaning matte instead of glossy. That will satisfy those for whom glossy is a non-starter. But the biggest change is a built-in lithium-polymer battery with a claimed life of up to eight hours on a single charge.

By “built-in,” Apple means that, as was mentioned in the pre-keynote speculation, you can’t remove it easily, which puts it in the same class as the battery in the MacBook Air.

As far as Mac hardware is concerned, that’s all folks. No new Mac mini or revised iMac, though the year is still young. There were no announcements about the status of the next version of Snow Leopard either, not even a demonstration to whet your appetite or any revisions in the anticipated shipping date.

Now since Apple is the largest music retailer on the planet, it was inevitable that they’d forge new agreements with the industry to make additional DRM-free songs available. As of today, some eight million tracks, 80% of their existing library, will be available without digital copy protection in 256kbps AAC encoding. While still not exactly CD quality, it comes, as with the previous iTunes Plus selections, much closer to that ideal.

The next bit of news, also anticipated, is Apple’s decision to abandon its one-price-fits-all model, clearly a concession to the music companies in exchange for getting more DRM-free product. Effective in April, the new price package has three tiers, from 69 cents for older catalog, 99 cents for recent stuff, and $1.29 for current hits. Of course, when you consider the increase in the cost of living since the iTunes store first premiered, the highest point really doesn’t represent that much of an increase.

Further, you can now download the very same tunes on your iPhone 3G, via a 3G network connection, and pay the very same price. That should put the kibosh on the wireless industry’s attempts to charge at least twice as much for music downloads that use their bandwidth.

On the software front, iWork ’09 made its debut, along with news about iWork.com, an online document collaboration capability for the new suite that’s reminiscent of Google Apps. The $79 package retains its current lineup, consisting of Pages for word processing and desktop publishing, Keynote for presentations and Numbers for spreadsheets. That’s right, folks, still no database or dedicated illustration components.

Typical for version upgrades of this sort, there are a smattering of new features but little that seems earthshaking or trendsetting. Apple remains far behind the broad scope of Microsoft Office and maybe that’s deliberate, although iWork ’09’s feature set is probably more than sufficient for most people.

Oh yes, there’s an iLife ’09 as well. Again, the enhancements are simply evolutionary, the sort of things you expect in an annual software update. I am, however, curious about the extra image editing capability in the new iPhoto. No, it’s not going to take away any business from Adobe, either for Photoshop or Elements, but for the intended audience of regular people who don’t aspire to become professional photographers, it’ll do just fine.

Under normal circumstances, most of these announcements could have been made with simple press releases. Even the 17-inch MacBook Pro is, which is so similar to the smaller version, except for the built-in longer life battery, matte screen option and a few other minor things. After all, the unibody form factor has already received its share of coverage.

Even expected improvements to the iPhone remain in the land of hopes and dreams. The firmware is still 2.2, and the promised push notification capability has disappeared from the list of promised features, evidently. Published reports of developer releases of the Apple software don’t even mention it anymore.

If there was anything particularly interested about the keynote, it came at the end. There was no Jobs cameo, or anything approaching a “one more thing.” Instead, there was a musical presentation from veteran crooner Tony Bennett. But the keynote was, despite his presence, still a huge disappointment. No wonder Jobs didn’t want to go.

So, after months of sometimes morbid speculation, the story about the condition of Steve Jobs has finally been revealed in a brief statement posted at Apple’s site. The key and optimistic paragraph states: “Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.” And Jobs expects to regain all that lost weight by spring.

Fair enough. Hormone problems can cause all sorts of nasty things. No doubt the talking heads on the 24-hour cable TV networks will bring on their standard roster of physician-commentators to discuss the possible conditions from which Jobs probably suffers. Obviously they are making “educated guesses,” since they have no way of accessing the actual medical records. Or perhaps they are just talking through their hats, since they will no doubt be asked to discuss the worst-case scenarios.

In any case, media analysts will also begin to pore over what Jobs didn’t say in his brief statement, such as whether his condition was the real reason why he backed out of delivering the Macworld Expo keynote, or whether he just wanted to take a little time off and spend it with his family for once. Certainly he seems to imply it’s, in part anyway, the latter.

Then again, perhaps that decision was really all about Apple simply reducing the psychological importance of the Expo in their final year of participation, which, therefore, has the end result of making whatever new product announcements Philip Schiller delivers seem all the more significant. As I said previously, Apple clearly doesn’t want you to invest all your faith in the company into a single person. Moving forward, there will come a time when Jobs will leave the post, whether for health reasons or simply because he’s tired of the rat race. Regardless, if customers — and Wall Street of course — were reassured that Apple would continue to deliver trend-setting products, the “Steve Jobs effect” wouldn’t be quite as severe.

Indeed, there are suggestions even now that part of Apple’s recent stock price hit was due to concerns over Jobs’ health. So wherever it goes now, that issue has been factored in. Indeed, in the wake of the announcement about his treatment for a hormonal condition, the stock price began to drift upward. That may have been a reflection of the market’s feeling of reassurance, or perhaps part of a general upward trend. With the market, you may never really know.

Of course the naysayers might also try to find evidence of deception in this unexpected announcement from Jobs. Didn’t he phone a reporter for The New York Times a few months back, saying that he had already undergone treatment for his condition? If that’s the case, does it mean that the present statement is a new spin on an old issue? Or was the previous reassurance, delivered to the reporter on background, simply a description about a method of treatment that failed?

This isn’t, of course, the same as the popular TV series “House,” where the sick are brought in with obscure conditions and a team of doctors go through any number of diagnostic procedures and treatment methodologies before they finally figure out what’s really wrong. All this, of course, happens within the space of approximately 43 minutes, which is the duration of an hour TV episode minus the ubiquitous spots.

Or maybe the Jobs scenario is similar, but spread out over the space of a year. The doctors tried and failed to find the true cause of his condition, and previous treatments failed. His public message hints at that, particularly the phrase “after further testing.” All right, that’s good to know.

No, we don’t require his medical records, and certainly his health is a private matter, except insofar as it might impact on his ability to continue as Apple’s CEO. But it’s also good to know that he seems to recognize just how important such matters are not just to the company but to the public at large, when he writes: “I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.”

Fair enough.

So it would seem as if you won’t be seeing Steve Jobs in public too often until he feels that his weight has recovered to a point where that sickly aspect to his appearance is no longer an issue. Then perhaps he can make a triumphant return to the spotlight and make Apple’s stock price rise even faster.

There are some, no doubt, who will claim that Jobs is severely understating the seriousness of his condition, that he really does have a life-threatening or at the very least life-altering condition, and he is using a little spin control to break it to us gently.

That, however, seems a mite too paranoid. Lacking any evidence to the contrary, and considering the evident sincerity of Jobs’ statement, I’m inclined to take it at face value, and I suggest you readers do as well.

It’s quite easy for a tech writer to tell you what a certain company ought to do to become successful or at least remain successful. But the only thing is that if any of us really knew what was really necessary, we’d be making the big bucks as an executive at one of those companies. Instead, we remain in the underclass of overworked writers.

No, we don’t earn huge salaries at such pursuits, but someone has to do it, and that’s how it goes.

On the other hand, some things about a company’s behavior are blatantly obvious, and if you try to take a few lessons from history, it’s really possible to arrive at a few sensible conclusions.

You know, for example, that new Apple products are coming this week. Your expectations might have been lessened by their decision to call in a second act — in the person of marketing VP Philip Schiller — to deliver the keynote at the last Macworld Expo in which Apple will participate.

That would seem to indicate that there is no possible way that Apple will present anything more than a few minor revisions to existing products, and that will be the end of it. But I have a different point of view.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.