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Steve looks the same as last time so you aren’t missing anything.

He touted the high quality glass, plastics and aluminum of the new iMacs, as a way to give them a more professional look. It’s a refresh, with the 17-inch is going away, and the price going down, starting with a 20-inch system for $1,199 and up to $1,799 for the 24-inch model, which is $200 cheaper than the version it replaces. “It’s stunning, even thinner than before,” Jobs said. The iMac also sports a new wireless or wired keyboard, with dedicated keys for the dimmer, Expose, volume control and other functions.

Jobs said that the laptop and desktop Macs are growing at 3x the rest of the industry.

Jobs announced iLife 08, a completely new version of the suite for $79 and available today. “It’s the biggest jump in iLife since we first introduced it,” he said. iPhoto now catalogs photos as events, and allows you to “skim”(patent pending) through the thumbnails like slideshow. “We think events will dramatically enhance ability to enjoy photos,” Jobs said. The ‘event’ feature is common to services like Flickr.



Apple has 1.7 million .Mac subscribers, Jobs said, as a preface to announcing .Mac Web Gallery, which integrates with iPhoto 08 and iMovie 08. It has one-button photo sharing for creating Web galleries, rich AJAXy viewing, ‘print-quality’ downloads and integrated with the iPhone. Not revolutionary, but very slick.

Jobs talked about a brilliant Apple engineer who came up with new way of editing video that is “startlingly better.” iMovie 08 maintains its own library of videos and skim to preview feature similar to that of iPhoto. “It’s a far superior way to look at stuff and find videos in your library,” Jobs said. He showed scrolling through videos in the thumbnail view:”Isn’t this incredible,” he said.

The major improvement in creating movies is the ability to grab seconds or minutes of video from various clips like selecting text. Jobs demonstrated the ease of creating a movie and adding music with iMovie 08. “You can imagine in 20 minutes you can make a really cool movie like this,” he said.

iMovie 08 allows you to share videos with iTunes, .Mac Web Gallery, Media Browser or YouTube, and videos can be saved in Mobile, Medium and Large (better than DVD resolution) resolutions.

You get the idea that Jobs hopes to turn the .Mac service, which he said is growing at a “nice clip,” (which means not great given he typically uses words like “stunning” or “spectacular”) into a Web applications platform to attract users. The .Mac service is available for $99.95 per year and now provides 10 gigabytes of storage.

I would expect Apple to move strongly in the direction of creating a more full fledged Mac application platform for the Web that integrates with the desktop apps.