Here’s an intriguing thought: last year we all walked out of Macworld 2009 wondering if we were doing so for the last time, and yet last week we all walked out of Macworld 2010 knowing that it almost certainly was not the final one. In fact the general sentiment among long-timers is that it was one of the better Macworlds in years. Which begs the following question: how on earth did they just pull that off?

Wasn’t Macworld Expo supposed to die after Apple announced that it would no longer be participating? Wasn’t the entire event all about the Steve Jobs keynote and the chance to play with whatever he decided to introduce at the giant Apple booth? How about the notion that the down economy was the perfect excuse for vendors and attendees to follow Apple out the exit door, and the belief that the internet has made trade shows irrelevant anyway?

Surprisingly enough, none of the above turned out to matter. And as Macworld 2010 progressed and I realized that a successful Apple-less Macworld was indeed playing out before my eyes, I was hit by ten different revelations at various points in the week which might help explain how we just witnessed what some thought was impossible…

1) As day one progressed, I found myself feeling annoyed. I kept getting bumped into by other attendees, and our team had to wait behind a crowd just to get access to most booths. Then day two came and it felt even more crowded, and it finally occurred to me that this, of course, was a good thing; it meant that the masses had showed up after all. Fourteen months after Apple’s initial announcement that it wouldn’t be participating, nearly everyone must have known by now that Apple wouldn’t be there, and yet people showed up in force anyway. Turns out plenty of people had been attending Macworld all these years for the third party exhibitors, third party presentations, and community after all.

2) If the hardware booths were crowded, then the iPhone app pavilion was like a mosh pit – there were so many bodies packed in there that I half expected to look up and see Eddie Vedder crowdsurfing overhead. Some of it had to do with the fact that app developers were cramped four to a booth, something that they’ll hopefully space out a little better next time, but the hundred-plus developers exhibiting this year was an astounding increase over the five or so that were there last year. By betting big on apps and allowing small-budget developers to exhibit in tiny spaces for comparatively tiny prices, Macworld managed to create a massive area of growth – and the kicker is that as word spreads of just how hopping the app pavilion was this year, even more developers will likely want in on it next year.

3) Speaking of smaller booths, while companies like HP and Microsoft had giant booths as usual to show off their Mac-compatible products, the lack of any new products from Apple meant that I was already hitting up some of the smaller hardware booths on the first day, since there was no newly introduced iPhone to stop and write about. I’m not sure if vendors figured it out ahead of time or if they were just as surprised by the revelation as I was, but it turned out that Apple’s absence ended up putting more of the attendee focus on the smaller third party booths. More attention to those booths means that those vendors are more likely to come back next year.

4) The fact that Beatweek had six staff members in attendance this year meant that I was able to stop and take in some of the feature presentations, and the five that I attended were all top notch. David Pogue’s absurdist humor. Leo Laporte’s engaging manner. BT’s passion. Kevin Smith’s raunchiness. John Gruber’s intellect. I can’t tell you whether these sessions were better than in the past (in previous years our team wasn’t large enough for any of us to be able to slip away from the show floor), but I can’t help but wonder if any of these guys could have gotten away with what they did if Apple had still been unofficially calling the shots. At one point during the Pogue session, LeVar Burton was on stage pretending to be Steve Jobs in a rendition of It’s A Wonderful Life. And while most of what Gruber had to say about Apple was on the positive side, he laid out some real challenges that Apple is facing, and they were the kinds of things that I’m sure Apple would rather we weren’t focusing on. Kevin Smith managed to be even more inappropriately funny than the last time he showed up to Macworld (and this was a few days before his Southwest Airlines incident). I don’t know for certain whether Apple was indeed muzzling the featured speakers in previous years, but I do know that these sessions felt legitimate – and that they were all packed with bodies.

5) We journalists just love to gripe about trade shows that give us privileged free access but don’t manage to coddle us in a manner that’s quite perfect. And in previous years you could always hear grumbling in the press room about how the press registration policies were mysterious and seemed to change randomly from year to year. In some years only one journalist per publication could get into the press room, leaving the rest to try to work in the hallway. One year some journalists were given blue ribbons to wear instead of badges. But this year there was none of that; credentials applications were dealt with promptly and I’m not aware of any legitimate journalist, blogger, or podcaster who wasn’t given proper access. The journalist community had always collectively wondered whether it was Apple or Macworld who had been behind all the silly the runaround on press registration; I think we now have our answer. Should you care? Perhaps not. But it did speak to the way that the event was run this year overall. While we journalists can always be counted on to find something to complain about (the press room wasn’t open as late as some us would have liked, for instance), this year we had to work a lot harder to be our perpetually dissatisfied selves.

6) Speaking of journalists, while very few Apple-oriented journalists bothered to show up to CES last month, nearly all of them were at Macworld. This despite the fact that there were a fairly significant number of Apple-oriented exhibitors at CES that didn’t also exhibit at Macworld. This disparity will even itself out one way or the other, but the bottom line is that exhibitors like their products to be reported on, and the kinds of publications that are likely to report on Apple-oriented products have made it very clear that they intend to stick with Macworld no matter the vendor ratio. This suggests that some of those exhibitors who were lured off to Vegas this year amid the uncertainty surrounding Macworld’s future will end up coming back to the pack in 2011. In fact several of the conversations among journalists at Macworld this year were centered around how to convince those wayward exhibitors to rejoin the Apple community. If it comes down to a battle of wills between journalists and vendors, suffice it to say that there’s no one more stubborn than a journalist.

7) Apart from actually scheduling it on a major holiday, Macworld couldn’t have possibly picked a worse week of the year to hold its event than the first week of January – and yet they stuck with that same idiotic date for a quarter century. The result was that vendors and journalists were trying to communicate remotely with each other over Christmas and New Years to schedule appointments; attendees were trying to fly to San Francisco on a day when everyone else in the country was trying to fly home from their holiday vacations; and many teachers and students couldn’t attend because they couldn’t skip the first week of the winter semester. This year Macworld finally moved to February, which is an infinitely easier time of year to attend – and perhaps it helps explain why attendance remained strong even in Apple’s absence.

8 ) Macworld 2011 has been announced as being January 25th through the 29th next year, which will be just as easy to attend as this year’s February date was. Why the slight move up? I’m not sure. But I do know that it’s the exact same week in which Apple rather bizarrely introduced the iPad in a tiny room across the street from the convention center where Macworld is held, and so the date adjustment somehow feels proactive. If Apple wants to pull another stunt like that next year, it’ll have to squeeze it in even more tightly. Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. But if Macworld is in fact angling to try to force Apple to eventually come back to the pack now that it’s clear that the show will continue with or without Apple, maybe this was a subtle first move in that direction.

9) In fact, Apple looked a bit foolish for not being there this year and wasting the opportunity to build further hype for its upcoming iPad launch. If Macworld 2011 is also prosperous, then Apple will look more than a bit foolish for not being there. Is Apple too stubborn to return to Macworld, even if it does end up being the most pragmatic path? Probably. But you never know.

10) If Apple looked a little foolish for not being there, Apple-oriented vendors who sat this one out ended up looking fairly silly. Or as Chuck La Tournous of The Mac Observer put it, it was a “marketing coup” for the vendors who did show up. One thing is certain: if a vendor stayed home and its direct competitors showed up in 2010 and thrived, then there’s little doubt that said vendor will be there in 2011 alongside them.

I’m marking my 2011 calendar. You?