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WWDC 2009 should be remembered as the best in many years. It was the WWDC where Apple - or its products, at least - grew up.

There was nothing radical here. Nothing to set the world alight. However, there was a show of growing confidence from a company that's less interested in being cool and more in the quiet advance of its maturing product lines.

Evidence for the defence, item one: the price of Snow Leopard. For a full analysis of Apple's pricing strategy, check out Kenny Hemphill's column on page 17, but in brief the decision to badge it up at $29 (about £18) was a masterstroke. That's not much more than you'd pay for interface-enhancing shareware, even without the underlying technology, Grand Central, QuickTime X and lighter codebase.

Item two: the iPhone 3G S. It's essentially the iPhone 3G with upgraded specs. It's not a baby-and-bathwater turf-out like we're used to seeing from rival phone manufacturers, which sell their products not so much on their features as their

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looks. That's why your three-year-old phone looks so out of date but your two-year-old iPhone (8GB, silver edging) still looks as good as it did on day one, despite being superseded by a slimmer, more contoured upstart.

Item three: the new notebooks. They're still MacBook Pros, and they still don't look wildly different to the PowerBook of five years back. The addition of a memory card slot is handy, although a bit behind the times and not exactly a headline sales point, but it does address the issue of how best to get DV footage and hefty Raw photo files onto a machine that's more than capable of editing them on the move without having to pack a bundle of cables. It's thoughtful: no more, no less.

And item four: Jobs. And the lack thereof. There was great speculation about the man himself and whether or not he would attend the show. Perhaps he did, and he stood in the wings listening to Schiller extolling the position-solidifying products Apple has been working on in his absence. Or perhaps not. In the end, it really doesn't matter, because his official no-show was little more than a footnote in most of the news feeds; in others, it didn't figure at all.

Over the past 12 to 18 months, Apple has transformed from hare to tortoise: no longer racing ahead with radical reinvention every few months, but working methodically, finding its stride and bolstering its position, perhaps with one eye on the Palm Pre and the other on Windows 7. That's exactly what it should be doing, and precisely why Microsoft and Palm will have been watching Schiller's address so closely.