Well, despite dampening expectations by giving Macworld Expo the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, Apple showed up in style to the MacWorld Keynote and put on a stellar performance, showing once again how well Steve has chosen the Men around him.

Phil Schiller, one of Apple’s senior Vice Presidents and one of Steve’s main men gave a presentation that excited the Mac faithful, has me reaching for my wallet and should get you excited too.

Here are some of the key annoucements made.

- iTunes Music will now be DRM free

- iTunes music tracks will have three price points, 69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29

- iTunes music will be purchasable over 3G networks

- iWork has been revamped.

- iLife has been revamped

- iWork has an online component called iWork.com that allows you to store and share your documents online.

- Keynote got an iPhone remote application that’ll really make giving presentations simple and amazing.

- Pages got a fullscreen mode, that blocks out everything (a la Writeroom) and lets you focus.

- Numbers got some really slick updates, some technical (like linking spreadsheets to pages and keynote files so the presentation stays current) and some flashy (like great looking graphs)

- Garageband, iPhoto and iMovie saw the most updates in the iLife update, though iWeb etc are all new too (meaning probably lots of themes)

- All the iLife iWork Apps got tons of new templates.

- Garageband now can show you “Learn to play lessons” from Sting, Norah Jones and more that teach you how to play piano or guitar and more, i beileve these cost $4.95 each, which sounds pretty reasonable since my local neighbourhood guy is $45 per hour for guitar lessons.

- iPhoto has a wealth of new feature, Facial Recognition means your photos can now be sorted by faces as well as the older “Event”, “Date” and “Keyword” methods. Face recognition is simple, easy and well implemented and also interacts with FaceBooks facial recognition system, meaning all the work you did up there will sync with your iPhoto library.

- iPhoto has Flickr integration and FaceBook integration.

- iPhoto gained Location awareness in iLife 09 too, it can sort your photos by the location they were taken in, giving you latitude and longtitude, showing you a map, and allowing you to give that place a name, like “Yosemite” or “Safari”

- iMovie got a bunch of user interface upgrades added as well as great location based features, allowin you to implement cool Indian Jones style segues to your vacation videos

- iMovie got engineering advances like Jitter removal, useful for video shot from a moving automobile, and tons of new transitions, as well as timeline and project building advancements.

- iLife 09 and iWork 09 require Leopard, and to make this whole package of fun and sharing tools easy and affordable, Apple is bundling Leopard with iWork and iLfe into a “Mac Box Set” for $169

- iLife ‘09 will retail for $79 or $99 for a Five Pack family edition

- iWork ‘09 will also retail for $79 or $99 for a Five Pack family edition

- Mac OS X Leopard still retails for $129

- The Mac Box Set saves you $120, almost the price of the Leopard itself, making it a no brainer.

- To use Leopard on your computer, you’ll need a 1ghz processor, 512mb Ram, and a good 12gb of hard drive space available.

- All this new stuff comes as standard on a new Mac (apart from iWork which is a $49 extra)

If you’d like to know more about the new Apple software released or, like to know how to maximize the use of your current Mac setup, please contact Brendan at 415-871-9683, I’ll be happy to show you some of the great features that can make your Mac even more useful for you, if you can imagine what you want your Mac to do, I can show you how to do it!