Several hours ago, Apple held a press conference for their Mac product line up at Apple Town Hall in Cupertino. At the event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a host of goodies for Mac lovers: new aluminium iMacs and updates to their iLife and iWork suite.

New iMacs

The new iMacs are absolutely drool-worthy and feature all new anodized aluminium frame and scratch-resistant glass displays, perhaps inspired by the iPhone. The new iMacs are available in 20-inch and 24-inch configurations, meaning that Apple is dropping the 17-inch iMacs from its product line. The redesigned keyboard spotted on the web last month turns out to be true and now come standard with the new iMacs.

At a glance, here are the specs of the new iMacs:

• 20-inch or 24-inch
• 2.0GHz or 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 1GB RAM standard
• 800MHz frontside bus (up from 667MHz)
• 250GB or 320GB hard drive
• ATI Radeon graphics with 128MB or 256MB RAM

Despite the upgrades, Apple has lowered the price of the 2.0GHz 20-inch iMac to USD1,199 and the 2.4GHz 24-inch iMac to USD1,799 i.e. savings of USD300 and USD200 respectively. For complete information on features and pricing, check out Apple’s iMac product page.

iLife ‘08

iLife skips a version and jumps straight to ‘08 with significant updates to the iLife apps. iPhoto can now automatically organise photos by events. New editing tools in iPhoto include the ability to copy and paste adjustments made on one photo to other images. Last of all, iPhoto has been integrated with .Mac to provide really flashy web galleries. Check out this example gallery.

iMovie has been updated too and sports a new icon. Besides the icon, iMovie also works much faster, has better integration with .Mac and can also share videos straight to YouTube!

iWeb ‘08 is a significant upgrade to the first version of the app. New features include web widgets, integration with Google AdSense and maps, my album pages, enhanced photo pages and support for publishing to personal domain names.

Check out the new iLife ‘08 suite.

iWork ‘08 now with Numbers

Apple also boosted its iWork productivity suite with new features and a new addition to the family: Numbers. Numbers is a spreadsheet application that features smart tables, chart creation, image management, text labels, and the ability to add photos and diagrams. Users can also put multiple sheets on a canvas and tie them together in formulas but not in formatting.

Keynote now features “Instant Alpha”, a feature that lets users remove backgrounds from images without needing photo editing tools and Smart Builds to streamline animations in slides. Meanwhile Pages features a new word processing mode and changes to the menus. Pages also features native support for Office Open XML so they can open .docx files without the need for that dumb Microsoft Office converter.

With these new features and at a price of USD79, iWork is a real bargain compared to the USD399 Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition. (iWork is also a whole lot easier to say than “USD399 Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac Standard Edition”). At this rate I may be able to free myself completely from Microsoft soon.

So that’s about all of the major announcements from the event yesterday. Stay tuned and myMacBUZZ will report on the many other items that slipped through the cracks, as well as local availability and pricing.