An InfoWorld article echoes a lot of what we’ve heard across the MacWorld expo floor and at the conference. Apple’s departure doesn’t have much impact on the vendor itself, or its many partners who don’t need a massive Apple booth to validate innovative third party Mac solutions.

Trade shows do serve businesses that don’t enjoy Apple’s high profile, but if you’re a show-going vendor, sharing a thinly carpeted exhibit floor with Apple isn’t much of a selling point.

This show might appear in another month than the Consumer Electronics Show, suggests Tom Yager. But the IDG expos group has already called 2010 the start of a new era, with a January 4-10 date.

Here on Bites of Apple we focus on small and medium business use of Apple solutions, with an emphasis on partner and third party offerings. But this is a vast universe of reporters and Web sites. The best way to start with an overview is Alltop.

Take a poke into mac.alltop.com to see how many sites, organized by expertise, are reporting and analyzing what’s happening this week. Many have RSS feeds to let you stay current, once you find one that fills your needs Alltop also operates education aggregation pages, as well as ones for photo creatives.

Inside the crowded halls of the Moscone Center the buzz runs steady today, as hundreds of products for Apple users make their debut from the third party community. Apple has limited its product announcements to a new suite of iWork and iLife apps, many which have significant upgrades. People are raving about the person and place identification in iPhoto ’09.

Of course, the most significant missing element is CEO Steve Jobs, who skipped Apple’s final MacWorld keynote. The vendor says it won’t participate in the 2010 edition of the conference, but some attendees and industry veterans here say that might change by next January. I doubt it, since Apple keynote address included the fact that Apple Stores bring in the equivalent of 100 MacWorlds every year, some 3.5 million.

Nobody here on the expo floor is bemoaning Apple’s exit, at least not in any public way. There are 40,000 attendees at this conference, down about 15 percent from last year. But putting 40,000 people in an expo center for three days generates a vastly different kind of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. The take-away walking out of these halls is a quantum leap of power over leaving an Apple Store, even after a One-to-One class, personal shopper session or a business consult.

Much of that is because of the vast range of solutions the Store knows little about. In a 300 square foot section of the expo floor I found four different document scanning and data storage solutions. Ways to capture business cards, store receipts. Some advertised integration with Filemaker, (Intelliscanner Mini) others could read data off a PDF created by an included scanner (NeatReceipts), and other offered communication using the auto-sync features of Address Book. Then there’s the mailing solutions, all demonstrated by people who answer questions without hesitation or reference to their company’s experts.

That’s a range you will never find in an Apple Store, because there’s 40,000 customers waiting to walk the aisles of two halls. The keynote, the classes — they’re just the icing on the cake and between the layers. As with any in-person conference, the networking and even listening to other customers questions at the booth teaches so much more than any Apple Store.

Best of all, arriving here on a $45 expo pass can earn that much in a discount for a single purchase, like a renewal for Lynda.com, the premier training Web site for applications and Macintosh and iPhone basic skills. It’s $250 for Lynda for a year, but just $200 here. And signing up got me a free $40 MacBlast ticket for tonight’s party. Perhaps it was the media badge, but perhaps not.

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Welcome to 2009. Is it time to embrace change yet? Just because it’s offered on your Mac, and in the computer press, doesn’t mean change will work for you.

Apple introduced Leopard’s version 10.5.6 last month, but even after a few weeks the latest release is still reported as a show-stopper for some Macs. Keeping up with all of the potential woe is a task best served with visits to two Web sites, macintouch.com and macfixit.com. Neither of these has stopped posting reports about failures caused by 10.5.6 installations. Mail quits after launching. Installation that kicks off a startup Loop, AirPort, Bluetooth problems, MacFixit reports. There’s plenty of cautions in the air on this one, as you can see at the link. Apple tells you nothing about problems, while some Web sites say nothing, either.

I’ve got this version installed on a Mac mini and haven’t seen any features go dark, but the tide of user reports about problems has not yet receded. You’ll want to be careful about generalized advice about upgrading. Up at bmighty.com, a publisher’s Web site devoted to small business, there’s an article by Alan Zeichick that tells us all it’s time to take the upgrade. Alan’s probably got a Mac like mine — at least I hope he’s got one — that took the 10.5.6 upgrade and swallowed it down without gagging.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to start advocating adoption. Sure, the new release has got significant improvements. But the potential for damage still seems high on this version of the OS, less than two weeks old. It’s standard IT practice to let a new release settle in for a few weeks before putting it on production machines.