In addition to the new iMac, Apple also introduced a new version of it’s iLife suite of digital lifestyle applications, called iLife ’08, and an upgrade to it’s desktop productivity suite, iWork. We’ll get to those later.

Let’s stick to hardware for a bit longer. As is often the case with these events, time constraints prohibited any “stage time” for some other hardware upgrades.

According to some pundits, the fate of Apple’s Mac mini computer, the tiny BYODKM (Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse) model, has been “up in the air”. Apparently, however, rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. After the event this week, the Mac mini was quietly upgraded. The mini finally gets Intel Core2Duo processors. At $599, it’s an excellent First Mac if you already have a display and USB keyboard/mouse from a previous computer relationship.

Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless base station and router also get Gigabit Ethernet (faster than standard Ethernet) ports, which were strangely missing from the model released at the first of the year.

Apple also announced upgrades to its .Mac (pronounced dot-Mac) internet services. For $100 per year (cheaper if you buy through Amazon or with a new Mac purchase) you now get 10GB of secure online storage space instead of 1GB. There’s a slew of other features that, in my opinion, make .Mac a bargain. I use it, always have.

Now on to iLife ’08. The iLife suite (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb and GrarageBand) is very much a part of what makes a Mac a Mac. It really is the core of the Mac experience, from a consumer standpoint. Every year or so, Apple updates the suite to make it more powerful and user-friendly. This year is no exception.

While iPhoto and iMovie got the bulk of the upgraded features, all the applications were improved, keeping iLife the best-in-class, collectively and individually, of consumer multimedia applications on any platform. Period. We’ll cover each in-depth in the coming weeks. We have to talk about something until Leopard arrives, don’t we. Which reminds me – you don’t have to wait for Leopard to use iLife ’08. It works splendidly on Tiger, and is just $79, which is less than what you’d spend to replace Vista’s photo application with Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Since my stage time is limited as well, I need to quickly mention that Apple also introduced a spreadsheet “for the rest of us”, called “Numbers”. More later.