This apple’s fallen far from the tree! In a surprise move, Apple Inc has announced that they would no longer take part at the Apple event all Macboys and girls look forward to — the MacWorld.

In a statement, the company said:

Apple® today announced that this year is the last year the company will exhibit at Macworld Expo. Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will deliver the opening keynote for this year’s Macworld Conference & Expo, and it will be Apple’s last keynote at the show. The keynote address will be held at Moscone West on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:00 a.m. Macworld will be held at San Francisco’s Moscone Center January 5-9, 2009.

Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.

Reactions from the Net are rife with speculation behind the reason for the exit. Is it because of a fall in share prices? Or is it a Steve Jobs tantrum? Some may call it prophetic what with expectations rising with every year and sooner or later, it had to happen that Apple couldn’t keep bringing out mindblowing products every January.

To be fair, though, Macworld without Apple is like Christmas without the tree. Is this the beginning of the end? With more and more vendors starting to make Apple’s components (there was Intel first and now nVidia), this could be a time that Apple may well go the Windows way licensing the OS and other software to rack up profits at the expense of hardware quality — something that Steve Jobs and co. have thus far fanatically controlled or commanded.

What it pans out as remains to be seen but this sure is a change of guard. Perhaps Jobs is on his last legs as Apple boss?