Macworld Keynote: Modest expectations are fully met

There were no lines outside the door of MacWorld this morning, a change from recent Keynotes. Another change: No new "killer" product. Nevertheless, the Phil Schiller presentation played to a relatively full house of very supportive Apple fans.

The high points: Significant upgrades to the iLife and iWork application suites, a new 17-inch MacBook Pro (finishing off the upgrades to the entire laptop line), and the iTunes Music Store is going DRM-free and fully supports both Wi-Fi and 3G on the iPhone.

Here's a quick rundown on each:

iLife '09
The new suite (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, Garageband) sports some major and more robust feature upgrades, including new special effects for iPhoto and iMovie, and mapping/geo-tagging capability to let users sort images by place, or make an animated map of your vacation journey between movie clips. Garageband now offers nine free music lessons for guitar and keyboard as a new feature.

As a bonus, Apple is offering "Artists Lessons" (at $4.95 per download), where artists like Sting will teach you one of their hit songs on piano or guitar, including a bit of history about how the song was created. iLife '09 ships the end of January, free with a new Mac purchase, or upgrades for $79 (single) and $99 (5-seat family license).

iWork '09
The new iWork '09 offers new effects, transitions and themes for Keynote and Pages, more formulas and improved charting for Numbers, and greater synching between them. Apple is also offering a 99-cent iPhone app which lets you run your Keynote presentation wirelessly through your iPhone. iWork '09 ships today, same pricing structure as iLife.

In addition, Apple is launching—today—the beta of "iWork.com," an online collaboration tool that integrates with all iWork apps, and allows downloading or annotation by third parties.

Both those suites require OS X Leopard (10.5.x), however. In recognition of that, Apple will be offering, at the end of this month, a "boxed set" of iLife, iWork, and OS X Leopard for legacy Mac users for $169.

New MacBook Pro
The new 17-inch MacBook Pro sports the same unibody construction and green-friendly materials as the previously launched 15-inch Pro and 13-inch MacBook. But it also adds two graphics card environments, up to 8GB of RAM, and either a 320GB or 256GB solid-state internal hard drive. The main difference, however, between the new machine and the others is that the new MacBook Pro uses new battery technology that claims up to 8 hours on a charge, for 1000 charges/5 years of life. Downside: Since the new battery takes up all available internal space, you can't swap it out yourself.

iTunes The final announcement, this year's equivalent of "one more thing," was that 80 percent of the iTunes Music Store's 10,000,000 song library would be DRM-free as of today, with the other 20 percent following by the end of the quarter. In addition, in April, the store will launch a three-tiered pricing structure: $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29, depending on the song's age and popularity.

More detailed analysis coming—stay tuned!

—Thomas A. Olson