Get ready for a culture clash, Mac enthusiasts. Third-party Apple vendors are heading to Las Vegas.

On February 9, 2010, thousands of Mac enthusiasts will gather together, as they do every year, for the annual rite of passage known as the Macworld Expo. They’ll get their badges, wait in line for seats to the keynote speech, and then a funny thing will happen. Apple CEO Steve Jobs will not appear. In fact, no Apple executive will appear on stage--for the first time since 1997.

It truly is the end of an era. Macworld Expo has long been the de facto event for showcasing Apple’s biggest announcements. In 1998 Jobs introduced the iMac at Expo. In 2001, he rolled out iTunes there. And in 2007, there was the shock heard ’round the world, as Jobs publicly announced the first-generation iPhone at the show.

That watershed moment looked like it would seal the Expo’s fate as the must-attend tech conference. Just ask any attendee of that year’s Consumer Electronics Show, held simultaneously in Las Vegas, just a few hundred miles away from Expo’s home in San Francisco. Thousands of CES exhibitors and hundreds of thousands of attendees found themselves immediately upstaged by a single company that wasn’t even at CES. Suddenly, tech reporters began to wonder if the mammoth CES had become irrelevant and whether the tiny Macworld Expo was now the better play.

The good times didn’t last, of course. Shortly before the 2009 Expo last January, Apple did the unthinkable and abandoned ship, stating its keynote would be its last. At the time, an Apple spokesperson noted that compared to the 3.5 million eager visitors dropping in on its stores each week, the value of a few thousand people visiting a booth or a speech at Macworld Expo was virtually nil.

T-shirts have been standard attire at Mac Expo, the trade show that invites Joe Consumer--be he schlumpy or hip--to come in off the street and test Apple’s latest gear.

So what happens now? Well, the trade show scene has become a free-for-all, as the titan of tech shows, CES, attempts to swoop in and scoop up exhibitors miffed that Apple has abandoned its namesake show. The 2010 CES show (scheduled for January 7 through 10) was originally planned to have a humble, 4,000-square-foot “i-Lounge” devoted to Apple gear. That space has now grown to 16,000 square feet and has 60 exhibitors signed up. The Consumer Electronics Association is also now advertising the show in Mac-centric media and using Apple-friendly social networks to get the word out, a first for CES.

To put it mildly, exhibitors haven’t been terribly pleased with Apple jumping the good ship Expo. One former Macworld exhibitor, iPhone sleeve-maker Incipio, says it is decamping for CES in 2010 purely because Apple won’t be at Expo to anchor attendance. Other exhibitors, like software outfit Rogue Amoeba, aren’t thrilled that Apple’s gone missing but are nonetheless keeping a toe in the Expo water, Apple or no Apple. Says CEO Paul Kafasis about Apple’s absence, “I don’t think it’s a great thing for the show or the community, but I think at least this year it’ll still be a pretty big show.”

Kafasis also says he hasn’t been swayed by CES’s Mac overtures, and Rogue Amoeba is keeping out of CES next year and for the foreseeable future. “We looked at CES briefly,” Kafasis says. “It’s kind of insane, and that’s putting it mildly. It’s not a Mac crowd, it’s a tech crowd. We make Mac products. Even if attendance is three times as high at CES, it’s probably not worth it for us.”

A roughly 20 percent discount on 2010 Macworld Expo floor space probably didn’t hurt his decision to stay put, either.

Naturally, Expo management has been playing off Apple’s departure as merely “disappointing,” and Paul Kent, General Manager of IDG World Expo, which produces the show, says Expo is on track to do well, with 28,000 attendees preregistered at press time, and 100 of an expected 300-plus exhibitors already signed up for booth space. Kent says a renewed focus on education sessions should help keep attendees engaged in the absence of the man in the black turtleneck, and he notes that Expo remains “the only real opportunity for Mac people to see each other face to face.” When asked if the show would keep on keepin’ on, he doesn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely the show will continue on. No question.”

Nevertheless, if history is any guide, Macworld has its work cut out for it. In 2004, Apple pulled out of the East Coast installment of Expo. By 2005, the show was dead for good.­

Macworld Expo vs CES: Compare & Contrast