Image: Apple Inc.

New iPods? Check. With cameras? Very likely. iTunes 9? Why not. Steve Jobs on stage? Who knows. The Beatles on iTunes? Don't count on it — but don't count it out, either.

Apple's (AAPL) invitation-only special event Wednesday could go either way.

It could be a ploy to get the press to publicize some relatively inconsequential improvements in Apple's increasingly long-in-the-tooth iPod line (a product line that once accounted for anywhere from a third to half the company's quarterly revenue and now brings in less than one fifth.)

Or it could signal the confluence of three classic Apple story threads:

• A new and surprising confection of hardware and software that restores our sense of childlike wonder;
• The reappearance of Apple's iconic CEO, restored to health by the organ transplant that saved his life;
• The digital debut — via iTunes — of one of the most influential bands in the history of popular music (and a Steve Jobs favorite), nearly 40 years after their break-up.

The timing is propitious.

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Image: MTV Networks via Apple Corps

Leave aside for the moment the rumors that Apple Inc. (AAPL) has invited a number of music industry professionals and press to an iPod/iTunes special event on Sept. 9.

We know for a fact that Apple Corps and EMI have scheduled the worldwide release of the original Beatles catalog — digitally remastered for the first time — in compact disc format on 09/09/09, an event timed to coincide with MTV Games' release of The Beatles: Rock Band. (Press release here.)

And thanks to Jeff Howe's long piece in the current issue of Wired Magazine, we have the back story of how the Beatles became a video game — a tale that begins with a meeting between George Harrison's son Dhani and Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks, on a secluded Caribbean beach nearly three years ago, long before Rock Band was released and became a hit.

It's a fascinating glimpse into the complexities involved in doing anything new with the Beatles' musical legacy, whether putting the songs in video game format or bringing them, at long last, to the iTunes music store.

Take, for example, this passage from Howe's piece:

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Last we checked, the full catalog of Beatles songs was supposed to be available for sale on the iTunes Store before the end of 2008.

Well, it's not happening this year, according to one of the band's two surviving members, and for all we know it may never happen.

"The last word I got back was it's stalled at the whole moment, the whole process," Paul McCartney told reporters gathered Monday for the media launch of his latest album, Electric Arguments. (link)

Where's Fake Steve Jobs when we need him?

Nobody was better at cutting through the posturing, lawyering and stonewalling by Apple Inc. (AAPL), the Beatles' Apple Corps and EMI that have kept the world's best-selling musical act off the world's largest digital music store lo these many years. (EMI owns the rights to Beatles recordings, but must get permission from Apple Corps to release them in new formats.)

A year ago, McCartney told Billboard.com that the deal was all but signed. "The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there’s just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it’s being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn’t be too long. It’s down to fine-tuning.” (link)

"Let me put that statement into American English," Dan Lyons (a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs) wrote at the time. "Paul wants more money." (link)

Now, a year later, the sticking points seem to have multiplied.

At Monday's press conference, Sir Paul was asked once again when the Beatles were coming to iTunes. Here, according to Billboard.biz, was his full reply:

"That is constantly being talked of, we'd like to do it," said McCartney. "What happens is, when something's as big as The Beatles, it's heavy negotiations.

"We are very for it, we've been pushing it. But there are a couple of sticking points, I understand. So the last word I got back was that it had stalled, the whole process.

"They [EMI] want something we're not prepared to give them. Hey, sounds like the music business.

"It's between EMI and The Beatles. What else is new." (link)

EMI, in response, issued this statement:

"We have been working hard to secure agreement with Apple Corps. to make the Beatles' legendary recording catalog available to fans in digital form. Unfortunately the various parties involved have been unable to reach agreement but we really hope everyone can make progress soon." (link)

Translation: Paul wants more money.

Or maybe Yoko Ono is the problem. One of the classic entries in the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs — before Lyons gave it up to write full-time for Newsweek (and before Newsweek finally muzzled the Real Dan Lyons) — was the scene in which he imagined Jobs and Yoko trying to thrash out an agreement in John Lennon's old apartment in Manhattan. (The deal falls apart on Yoko's insistence that the band be billed as  "John Lennon and the Beatles" with Yoko listed as the fifth Beatle.) (link)

The irony is that the parties involved have dragged their heels for so long that much of the deal's original value may have evaporated. Most everyone who cares about the Beatles has already filled their iPods with songs ripped from the CDs. Meanwhile, as Peter Kafka reports on All Things Digital, the boom in digital music sales seems to be slowing, which could make even the digital Beatles harder to sell. (link)

If Sir Paul is really waiting for a better offer, he — and the Beatles fans — could be waiting for a very long time.

[Photo: The Beatles' Feb. 7, 1964 New York press conference, courtesy of Apple Corps.]

Catching up on late week Apple (AAPL) news…

Beatles on iTunes in 2008. We've heard stories like it before, but this one has a twist. The London Evening Standard reported Saturday that Paul McCartney, who is said to be worth more than $1.65 billion, will begin releasing the Beatles catalog on iTunes in the coming months to help defray the $40 to $60 million it may cost him to get out of his four-year marriage to Heather Mills. A final divorce hearing is set for March 17. But the Standard goes on to say that Mills could could argue that the deal, said to be worth an estimated $400 million, should be included in her settlement. So Sir Paul is going to release a 40-year-old catalog to raise money to pay a settlement that gets bigger as a result of the sale? (link)

iPhone Software Roadmap video. For those who couldn't make it to Cupertino for the March 6 event, Apple has made the entire presentation — all 1 hour and 18 minutes — available in Quicktime and HD. See Steve Jobs present U.S. smartphone market shares in a pie chart tilted to make the iPhone's slice look bigger. See Phil Schiller demo push e-mail and remote wipe. Watch EA's Travis Boatman play a preliminary iPhone version of Will (The Sims) Wright's Spore. (link)

iPlayer on iPhone. As promised (after getting pressured by Mac fans), the BBC has introduced an iPhone and iPod touch version of its iPlayer, which makes BBC shows available for download over the Internet. (link) It's still in beta and is only for British residents and for programs within seven days of broadcast. As Saul Hansel points out in Bits, the Beeb got around the fact that the iPhone doesn't support Flash by reformatting its video into the QuickTime version of H.264 — which is what Google does to put YouTube videos on the device.

The Macworld Conference & Expo, Silicon Valley's largest technology trade show, opens Monday. But the moment everyone is waiting for comes Tuesday morning, when Steve Jobs makes his annual keynote address at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

Jobs has set a high bar for himself. At Macworld 2006, he introduced the first Intel (INTC)-based Macs — sparking a burst of sales that nearly doubled Apple's (AAPL) market share from roughly 4% to something approaching 8% (link). At Macworld 2007 he unveiled not just the all-but-forgotten Apple TV, but also the iPhone — a device that in nearly everybody's book turned out to be the machine of the year.

What can Jobs do to top that?

There's no shortage of speculation. The Apple rumor machinery has grown so elaborate that for the second year in a row, Ars Technica's John Siracusa has published a keynote Bingo card (available in PDF format here and in iPhone format here), with boxes to be filled in as Jobs makes his announcements, introduces his guests and trots out his trademark rhetorical flourishes. (The rules of the game are spelled out here.)

Nobody has yet shouted out "Bingo!" in middle of a Steve Jobs presentation — a moment brilliantly anticipated in IBM's buzzword Bingo TV ad (link) — but this could be the year.

Some of Siracusa's boxes are obviously more important than others. A couple (Mac Pro and Xserve) were preemptively filled last week, and there are a few key possibilities that he missed. Watch especially for:

• A Skinny MacBook. Probably the leading candidate for Jobs' one-more-thing moment, it's already been named — Macbook air, thin, nano and mini — and imagined in PhotoShop (see here, for example) by bloggers who should know better. Likely specs: 12 to 13-inch. LED backlit screen, under 3 lbs., half as thick as today's MacBooks, 32, 64 or even 128GB solid-state flash drive, priced around $1,600.
• iPhone updates. A bump in capacity from 8GB to 16GB and maybe 32GB is expected, as well as a preview of the software developers toolkit (SDK) promised for February; we might even get a few demos from developers, like EA, who were seeded with the SDK last fall. A 3G iPhone and a Newton-type tablet are reported to be in the works, but not yet ready for prime time.
• Movie rentals. This is the item Hollywood is following most closely. It's been widely reported that Fox and Disney are likely to make movies available on iTunes for overnight rental (at $3 to $5 for 24 hours) or for purchase for roughly the price of a shrink-wrapped DVD. If, as rumored, Paramount, Lions Gate and Warner Bros join them, the flood of fresh video content could breath new life into the Apple TV. (The Associated Press reported Sunday that Netflix (NFLX), anticipating such a move by Apple, will offer unlimited monthly video streaming.)
• DRM-free Music. Having famously championed the cause with his February 2007 Thoughts on Music memo, it would be surprising — and disappointing — if Jobs did not use this opportunity to announce a significant expansion of the DRM-free offerings in the iTunes Store, especially after the last of the major labels announced last week that they were putting their music on Amazon.com (AMZN) without copy protection.
• Microsoft (MSFT) Office 2008. No surprises here, since the reviews are already in, but an excuse for what should be the most lavish after-hours party of the show.
• The Beatles. It's about time. Just in case, Yoko Ono's John Lennon Educational Tour Bus mobile recording studio is making the trip from its Las Vegas unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show to be at Macworld. A few hours after Jobs' speech, there's a press reception in the bus that's co-sponsored by Apple.

You already see the flashbulbs popping, right? But is it enough? Apple's marketing machinery is like a shark that must keep swimming or die. Even if nearly every square on the Bingo card were to be filled on Tuesday, would Jobs have delivered the kind of innovation and buzz the faithful have come to expect?

And then there's Wall Street to consider. Apple was the high-flying tech stock of year, its share prices having more than doubled in 2007. But as a CNNMoney headline put it on Friday, "What've you done for me lately?" The stock fell nearly 30 points over the last two weeks, which could be taken as a measure of traders' uncertaintly. (Or it could just be a well-timed pause to set up the Macworld effect, the short-term bump tech share prices often enjoy after a Steve Jobs' keynote.)

No matter how high the bar, Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg is confident that Jobs will clear it. "This is a company that thinks in terms of strategy," he says. "Do I think they'll deliver something as disruptive as the iPhone? No. You don't achieve that kind of disruption every week; it would be tantamount to getting into a whole new industry. But somehow Jobs always manages to meet expectations, even if the expectations are different."

To find out how different, tune in Tuesday for Fortune senior writer Jon Fortt live blogging from the keynote at fortune.com/bigtech, video coverage from CNNMoney.com and our post-keynote analysis here on Tuesday afternoon.

A few bits of Apple (AAPL) news worth noting:

Paul McCartney: "It's all happening soon," he told Billboard.com. "Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go — there's just maybe one little sticking point left, and I think it's being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn't be too long. It's down to fine-tuning. I'm pretty sure it'll be happening next year, 2008." (link)

"Let me put that statement into American English," says Fake Steve Jobs. "Paul wants more money."

First Leopard Update: More than a dozen improvements in Mac OS X 10.5.1, issued three weeks after Leopard's release, including fixes in Mail, Airport, Time Machine, Back to My Mac and some pesky Firewall issues. Not yet repaired: Among the repairs: that nasty core data bug.

iMac Anti-freeze: Apple also released a graphics firmware update that's supposed to finally solve the freezing problem some aluminum iMac users have been suffering since September. I'll believe it when my Dad tells me his iMac has gone more than a week without crashing.

Three New Mac Ads: The Get-a-Mac ads are back on TV (and available from Apple here) after a summer hiatus. "Same joke," writes Michael Gartenberg. "Still as effective." But maybe not quite as funny.