The Apple Keynote just finished earlier today, and I'm getting this up after I've covered everything discussed by Phil Schiller, who is a senior vice president of Apple in worldwide product marketing. Today he introduced a few new software upgrades, the revised 17-inch MacBook Pro, and a huge revision to the iTunes music store.

Mr. Schiller is taking over for Apple CEO / rock-star god Steve Jobs due to a minor health issue that Steve is addressing (it's believed to be a hormonal imbalance, which has been affecting his weight). It's not a death-bed sentence, not a mortal illness; it's just a minor issue. Regardless, many people and Apple fans were hoping to see Steve deliver this keynote address, since it is the final Macworld appearance for Apple in the foreseeable future. They believe that due to their popular growth in recent years, and the amount of visitors they have through their retail stores coupled with the online traffic their online stores received, their presence in trade shows will become unnecessary, as seen here in this press release. One thing is for sure, this is a stun to the Apple cult-fanatic, giving the event a feeling very familiar to how Obi-Wan Kenobi once said: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.”

But enough of that, let's take a look at what was announced and demoed:

-iLife '09-

iLife is Apple's included multi-media software used to organize your collection of photos, home videos, and other personal digitized memories. What's new in iLife '09 involves the following applications: iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand. Minor updates have been brought to iWeb and iDVD, too.
There were two huge updates for iPhoto: this app uses face detection and recognition technology to identify people in your photo collection, and organize your collection by the people found in your photos. This system is called “Faces”. This feature is integrated with Facebook: when your friends tag themselves in photos through Facebook's online system, iPhoto is automatically updated with those tags and they'll end up back on your computer. Another great feature for iPhoto is “Places” (geo-tagging), which is supported through GPS-enabled digital cameras or your iPhone. GPS-enabled cameras will store the location data of a picture that is taken to the image file, and once it is uploaded to iPhoto successfully you'll be able to explore a map of where your photos have been taken, by location. If you don't have a GPS-enabled camera, you'll be able to manually identify the location yourself.
iMovie is getting a huge revision to it's editing features, which will make this app much more useful to the budding movie-maker. New features include stuff like picture-in-picture and green screen technology. In addition to this, there are more precise instruments to edit your film and audio streams, as well as new image-stabilization technology, which your computer will use to make your video less shaky and clearer. I've yet to see the demo on the image-stabilization myself, but from what I've been reading it is very impressive.
The last large upgrade for iLife '09 was in GarageBand, and this is a pretty cool thing: GarageBand now offers you basic lessons to begin learning the guitar and piano, as well as lessons given by a collection of popular and classical artists, like Ben Folds, Patrick Stump, Sting, John Fogerty, Sarah McLachlan, and more. Yes, you can learn guitar from the greats of Fall Out Boy and the Police, for a price (one lesson from Ben Folds, please). Other stuff includes a new virtual band to play along with and new guitar-effects.

iLife '09 can be purchased from Apple later this month for $79.

-iWork '09-

The two huge features and upgrades I'd like to mention for iWork '09 involves Keynote and online office suites.
What's notable about Keynote, other than new transition animations that affect images and text, is that the iPhone can now be used as a remote for your presentations. With a downloadable app from the iTunes App Store, you can control your presentations via your own iPhone, which will be able to show you the upcoming slides in your presentation and the notes included in your show. This is pretty spiffy, if you're a well-rounded Apple user.
The other cool thing about iWork '09 is that you are now able to share your iWork documents online, much like an online-office suite. You'll be able to upload your documents to iWork.com, invite whomever you'd like to view and/or edit the document, and even simultaneous viewing and note-taking, much like Google is doing for it's online office suite, Google Docs.
Other minor updates are a true-full screen capability for Pages, some visual and organizational aids in Numbers, and other minor tweaks.

-The 17-inch MacBook Pro-

Finally, we're getting to some hardware here. The 17-inch MacBook Pro is receiving the treatment that it's 13 and 15-inch brethren, and that includes a new glossy screen (note the $50 “anti-glare” matte downgrade) with a native resolution of 1920x1200, glass touchpad with Multi-Touch gestures, and the Nvidia graphics upgrade (the 9400M chipset + the 9600GT discrete card). In addition to more powerful Intel Core2 processors, an insanely priced 8GB memory option ($1,200?!) and solid-state-drive options, there's really only three other great things to mention about this notebook: the size, weight, and battery.
They said that there was pressure among the engineers to design a notebook that was smaller, lighter, but still delivered impressive battery performance. Apple does believe that they did right with this new system, which has a non-removable battery, but delivers up to 8 hours of use without the discrete graphics card (7 hours when you do use the 9600GT). Knowing that, also take notice that this computer is less than an inch thick, and weighs just 6.6lbs. Overall, I think that's really impressive given the power of that integrated 9400M chipset, and this coming from a guy who thinks non-removable notebook batteries are sacrilegious.
Whether or not you're moved by the machine, it'll cost you $2,799 for the base system ($5,199 fully loaded, w/out accessories, applications, or other services).

-iTunes Goes DRM-Free-

This was probably the most exciting thing to hear from Phil all morning, that iTunes has begun the move to go DRM-free. With the support from four major music labels (Universal Music Group, EMI, Sony BMG, and Warner Music Group) iTunes will be able to offer over 10 million songs in it's iTunes Plus section, which is the DRM-free option. If you have an iTunes library that you'd like to upgrade to DRM-free, you can do that by paying %30 more of the original price right now. 8 million songs are available DRM-free today, but the other 2 million won't be available until late-March.
Also, there is a new pricing structure utilized by the iTunes music store. Three price points (69 and 99 cents, and $1.29) will become familiar to iTunes shoppers soon, as more flexible pricing has been a point brought to Apple by the music labels.
Finally, 3G capability for the iTunes store is now a realization, meaning that you can now browse content, purchase, and download music and videos through your iPhone. As you'd expect, all content purchased and downloaded from iTunes through your iPhone is playable on other Apple devices.

And that was it. The lights came on, the applause inevitably faded, and all was done. No new Mac Mini, no Steve Jobs, no new device. Overall, after reading about software upgrades, store upgrades, and a notebook that I could never afford... I felt pretty underwhelmed. I knew that to expect a new iPhone device or even a small and affordable netbook would be asking for too much, but that Mac Mini really deserves an upgrade, and all evidence pointed to it. I guess I'll be going another year sans Apple.

The poster image for this article was modified from a photograph taken by Flickr user roger_jones, and is being used under a Creative Commons license.