At the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, CEO Steve Jobs unveiled new iMac desktop  computers on Tuesday, featuring a sleek aluminum-and-glass design, along with updates to the iWorks and iLife software packages. The iMacs are available immediately, in 20- and 24-inch models, with prices starting at $1,199 for the smaller iMac.
Jobs spent most of his iMac talk cooing over the new aluminum-and-glass design. "It's just stunning. It's just gorgeous," Jobs said.
The iMacs feature Intel Core 2 Duo processors, running at speeds up to 2.8 GHz. But the updates are modest, considering they were due to be delivered in June, observed Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group.
"The iMacs were late and there's no touch stuff," he said, arguing that "the iMac is lagging behind the HP TouchSmart."
He added that it's "unusual for HP to be ahead of Apple" in the all-in-one machines, and said that today's announcements show that "for the past six months, the major work was on the iPhone and it pretty much eclipsed everything else."
Apple iLife and iWorks
The iMac's iLife '08 software includes a new version of iMovie that Jobs said was inspired by an Apple engineer's realization that it was impossible to create a five-minute video in less than 30 minutes using the previous version of iMovie. The new version allows click-and-drag scene selection and rapid drag-and-drop editing in a movie template .
The major new addition to the iWorks suite is a spreadsheet program called Numbers, which allows users to combine pictures, graphs, and photos with spreadsheets.
The iPhoto software now boasts an Events feature, which sorts downloaded photos by date. Photos taken on a certain date can be previewed without opening the folder. Events can be merged, so all pictures taken on a vacation can be combined as a single event. This version of iPhoto offers syncing for iPhone users.
Looking Toward Leopard
Mac customers should look toward this fall's announcement of Leopard, the next version of OS X, Enderle said. "Leopard hopefully should shift the emphasis back to Mac."
Enderle predicted Apple will release a new iPod this fall that is essentially an iPhone without the phone. "We know the new iPod will embrace some of the features of the iPhone," he said. "We just don't know how much."
Pricing for the new iPod should be similar to the iPhone, but with the new iPod offering more storage capacity, he said.
Because the major complaint about the iPhone is the poky AT&T network , Enderle concluded, Apple foresees big business for the new iPod that can serve as a PDA, photo browser, music player, video player -- and doesn't lock users into a long-term contract on a slow cell network.
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