Apple Bows Aluminum iMacs, New iLife, Spreadsheet

The widely expected update to Apple's iMac desktop line includes shiny new aluminum-and-glass casings and thin, laptop-style keyboards, while updates to iLife and the online .Mac service let you upload snapshots from your iPhone directly to a Web site. Also new: Apple's first spreadsheet app.

While the new iMacs certainly look cool, there's nothing all that earth-shattering in the updated design; we're still talking an all-in-one flat panel that crams in a disc-burning SuperDrive, a 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, built-in Bluetooth 2.0, a souped-up ATI Radeon HD graphics card, and up to 2GB of RAM. The 17-inch iMac is gone with the wind, leaving the now-$1,800 24-inch iMac and two versions of the 20-inch model: one with a 2.4GHz processor for $1,500 and another with a slightly slower, 2.0GHz processor for $1,200. Also notable about the new iMacs is the newly designed keyboard, which comes with thin and flat keys like those you'd find on a laptop. I haven't had a chance to try the new keyboard myself, but I'm not sure a laptop-style keyboard for the desktop iMacs was the way to go—after all, isn't a full-sized keyboard with standard keys easier on the fingers?

Meanwhile, Apple's multi-app iLife package is getting a significant update. First up is iPhoto, which now lets you group photos into "Events" (nice, but how is that different from grouping pictures in albums), as well as one-touch publishing to the Web with help from the online (and long neglected) .Mac service. You'll also be able to send pictures from your iPhoto directly to your .Mac site (which now gets 10GB of storage for $100/year), while your friends can add their own snapshots to your site by sending pictures to a specific e-mail address. Kinda cool, and slickly done, but not exactly ground-breaking. Also announced was a new interface for the iMovie video editing app, pro-level encoding for iDVD, and live "Web widgets" for the iWeb site-building app.

Finally, Apple's iWork productivity package gets a big update with Numbers, a new spreadsheet app (Apple's first, in fact) that includes plenty of fancy charts and tables, a print preview mode that lets you make on-the-fly changes, a slick "canvas" that lets you drag and drop comments, graphics, and photos, and—most importantly—compatibiliity with Microsoft Excel. Will Numbers be a true Excel competitor? I'll leave that for small-business guru Chris Null to decide, but at first glance, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up on Excel quite yet.

The new iMacs, plus the updated iLife and iWork suites ($79 each), are available now.

Update: Apple also quietly updated the diminutive Mac Mini, which many had assumed was on the chopping block. The new Mini models get Intel Core 2 Duo processors and more RAM, along with bigger L2 caches for faster performance. The 2GHz Mini retails for $800, while the 1.83GHz Mini goes for $600.

Related:
Live from Apple's summer Mac product press conference [Engadget]