Moments later, the voice of Johnny Cash fades out and a man in trademark black sweater walks to the middle of a stage, to rapturous applause.

Once more, Steve Jobs will try to dispel the affection that his disciples held for computer products that have gone before by unveiling a host of new Apple gadgets that will, inevitably, turn the auditorium into a feverish pit of chanting and clapping.

“The new iPods are really thin, they’re as thin as two CDs!” he enthuses at one point. Later, he urges: “The G5 is one of the most important product announcements we’ve made in a long time. It is the world’s fastest PC!” The Apple chief executive spends two hours revving the crowd into ever higher levels of delirium, unveiling new wireless Apple products and some additions to its sleek line-up of metallic notebook computers.

But as excited as the crowd becomes, some of the Apple acolytes walk away from the high point of the company’s annual expo in Paris — Jobs’s music and video-packed keynote speech — with a slight twinge of disappointment.

He had avoided any mention of a launch date for Apple’s revolutionary iTunes music download service in Europe, or when it might release a version to run on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. “It’s not the day to talk about iTunes,” he later explains.

Apple is famous for never talking about a product or service before its launch. With less than 5 per cent of the global PC market, fighting against titans such as HP and Sony, the company’s greatest weapons are stealth and innovation.

As far back as the launch of the original Macintosh computer, to the more recent releases of the iMac, titanium laptop and iPod, Apple has made a habit of wrongfooting the technology heavyweights with jaw-dropping new products. Each time, secrecy has been paramount.

But it’s not so easy for Jobs to sidestep questions about iTunes, which is being hailed by some long-suffering record industry executives as the answer to rampant music piracy.

Jobs drops hints about the timing of its European launch, and what is behind the hold-up: “I think we’ll do it next year; we’re working very hard on it.”

Pressed further, he says the launch is being delayed by the complexity of working out copyright payments to publishers across different countries.

“When we distribute a song electronically, we may have to pay different people in France than we do in Germany. It’s obviously not as simple as America, and there’s no road map for us; it all has to be found out and sorted.”

Many observers believe Apple is more focused on launching the Windows version of iTunes in the US than it is on Europe. The company has committed to launching the Windows version before the end of the year. Jobs says: “We said (iTunes for Windows) would be out in the US next quarter, before the end of the year. I think we are very much on track.”