Apple unveils new iMacs, Mac Minis, iLife, iWork

In case you missed our online coverage yesterday, there was a whole lot of new product news at Apple's afternoon press event in Cupertino. Perhaps most exciting is the new iMac (pictured at your right), which has managed to shed a few pounds while gaining the expected Santa Rosa chipset and a svelte, anodized aluminum look. Surprisingly, the Mac Mini also got a speed bump, suggesting that the rumors of its imminent demise were greatly exaggerated.

On the software side of things, iLife, iWork and .Mac all got the update treatment, with new features like web-based photo/video galleries, a iPhoto-like movie library and improved integration with other Apple products seeing their debut. The most exciting news on the software front, though, is the addition of "Numbers"--an Excel-like spreadsheet app--to the iWork suite. That brings iWork one step closer to being a full-fledged Office competitor, even though we didn't get the rumored Google Apps integration that we were hoping for.

Apple also took the opportunity of yesterday's online store downtime to make a few stealthy changes to existing products without any public fanfare. First off, the Airport Extreme Base Station now has four gigabit Ethernet ports, making the device's ridiculous $179 price tag a little easier to swallow. Meanwhile, the Mac Pro got an optional PCI Express RAID card that supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 0+1, and Enhanced JBOD and promises as high as 304MBps of sequential read in RAID 0. Of course, it's gonna cost you--to the tune of $999 in any MacPro model. Finally, iPhones got a little over-the-air update during the Stevenote yesterday, waking up a few .Mac/web-gallery features that were previously unknown to exist in the little guy's OS.

For more on the new iMac, Mac Mini and software updates:
- check out our online coverage of yesterday's announcement