First things first, it seems: New iMacs, duh, but new iMacs that look something like the old iMacs. But with less of a frame around the screen, and more brushed-metally. Nice stats, too. You get up to a terrabyte of internal storage, up to a 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme proc, up to 4GB RAM, and ATI’s bringing the GPU with its Radeon HD cards. Not bad.
And they’re keeping axing the 17-inch model, which we’d heard would be axed. Pricing is about the same, though the 24-inch drops by $200, which is also dope. That means $1199 for the basic 20-inch model, $1499 for the souped-up 20-incher, and a totally reasonable $1799 for the top-end 24-inch iMac. Not bad at all. But wait, there’s more.
Let’s talk about iLife ’08. The popular iPhoto is getting new organizational tools, but no word if they’re fixing that ColorSync issue. It’s set to work tighter with the new .Mac subscription service, which is nice, but if you also have an iPhone, you can sync your iPhone’s photos to your .Mac and iPhoto ’08 automagically.
It would appear they’re adding video organizing tools similar to the ones in iPhoto to iMovie. That’s cool, if you, ya know, use iMovie. But they’ve also sped it up and added much more encoding options and more HD support, including that of AVCHD cards, which is cool.
Apple has also updated iWeb with Web 2.0 drag and drop tools. Want to add Google maps to your site? Drag the GooMaps widget onto your page, upload, done. Kinda cool.
New iDVD as well, mostly with new themes and better encoding. This is good, as there have been complaints about pixel shifting and other minor annoyances.
Garage Band is getting updates too, along the same lines. The entire iLife suite will run you $79, a pretty good deal. It’s also free with all new Macs.
Jobs says that .Mac is getting an upgrade, from 1GB of online storage to 10GB. Same price, at $100 a year, which is a pretty good deal. Not fantastic, but good.
If you’re pro, Steve’s talking about the new iWork ’08: Pages and Keynote, and now Apple’s adding Numbers, the sought-after spreadsheet app. Pages gets updated for easier basic word processing, and better page layout modes. Cool. Keynote gets easier as well, so making high-end presentations should be simpler.
Numbers is the “spreadsheet for the rest of us,” because, yah, it’s Jobs. Anyway, it features “check-boxes and sliders”, which I guess makes math easier. Live previews of charts is cool, and adding the iWork-ish interface should be cool to use.
It appears as if we’re done, lest there’s a “one more thing…” coming, but now it’s Q&A time. My question: When are you going to fix the iPhone, Mr. Jobs?