Verizon (VZ) quietly announced last week that it was done seeking out new markets for Fios, which means that cities like Boston, Baltimore and Alexandria, Va., won’t ever get access to the service. But the company will continue to expand its footprint in cities it’s already in, like New York.

The telco says it had always planned on winding down its expansion after spending $23 billion to upgrade its network. But its competitors are certainly treating this as a victory, and the halt will fuel speculation that Verizon will end up buying satellite broadcaster DirectTV (DTV) in order to compete with cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) coast-to-coast.

More from The Wall Street Journal:

FiOS is Verizon’s counter to the cable companies’ Internet phone service, which has been successful in nabbing away telco customers. Despite FiOS’s presence, cable providers such as Cablevision Systems Corp. have weathered the competitive storm. The other telcos have also been upgrading their networks to deliver more services, but they haven’t been as aggressive…

For Verizon, it’s still unclear whether the bet will pay off. Mr. Kula said that in markets that FiOS is available, it has achieved 25% penetration for television service and 28% for Internet.

Growth in FiOS appears to be slowing. In the fourth quarter, Verizon added 153,000 customers each for FiOS Internet and TV, which was down sequentially and from a year ago. In total, the company has 3.4 million FiOS Internet and 2.9 million TV subscribers.

There’s a lot of emphasis at this unveiling on environmental concerns, reducing the footprint for manufacturing the new notebooks.

Says Ives: “We’ve refined every detail in service of the user.”

Steve Jobs announces that it’s time for Q&A, but with a caveat. No questions about the economy, he says, or Apple’s financial performance because there will be an earnings report next week. And no questions about “my health,” he adds, as a new slide appears on the big screen above him showing his blood pressure.

As the audience laughs, Jobs welcomes Apple COO Tim Cook and Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, to the stage to take questions from the audience.

Apple (AAPL) does not have an exclusive on the new Nvidia chip, but it will be first to market. “And we’re buying a lot of chips.”

Why no Blu-ray? “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurts,” says Jobs. Apple is waiting things out before “passing that cost burden on to consumers.”

Jobs expects the redesigns to trigger a refresh cycle in both the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Someone asks why there are no matte screens. Answer: “The vast majority of our customers prefer a glossy finish.”

The 17-inch MacBook Pro is still available, but it has not been refreshed like the other models.

Final question: “Do touchscreens make sense on laptops?” Jobs’s reply: “We’ve experimented with them, but they don’t make a lot of sense to us.”

So no tablet.

And with that, the event is over.

PREVIOUSLY:

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