It looks like the Mac-creating company will soon don a new set of management clothes. According to CNN Money, analyst Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray said that this shift in the heavy-weight management roster has already entered its early stages.

The clearest indication of this is the fact that vice president Phil Schiller will be the one to perform the keynote speech at this January edition of Macworld (which will be the last time Apple participates at the event). It had become a time-honored tradition for Steve Jobs to be doing this, but it would seem the winds of change have really picked up.

Munster predicts that Jobs will remain in his CEO throne because he would otherwise do considerable damage to the company’s image. His drive and charisma have long ago turned him into “the irreplaceable face of Apple”. But he will gradually bestow more and more public appearances to a management team who, despite being the cause of many of the company’s successes, were just faceless individuals toiling in shadow.

This group of previously unknown super-heroes numbers 11 people: Timothy D. Cook, Tony Fadell, Ron Johnson, Philip W. Schiller, Scott Forstall, Jonathan Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Bertrand Serlet, Sina Tamaddon, Daniel Cooperman, Bob Mansfield. They all hold key positions at Apple and one of them might very well succeed Steve Jobs one day.

It may also be that the company has started preparing for the moment when the current CEO will be no longer at its helm. These recent moves made by Apple come at a moment when there’s a lot of speculation about Jobs’ degrading health.