ILife '09, which will be available later this month, will list for $79 as an upgrade and for $99 for a family pack that comes with a five-Mac license. The new suite will be bundled with all new Macs starting at the same time, Schiller said.
Apple's iWork application bundle also got a refresh, and Schiller walked Macworld attendees through a demo that highlighted a full-screen view in Pages, the suite's word processor; a new mail-merge function and 40 new templates in Numbers, the spreadsheet application; and Keynote Remote, a 99-cent iPhone and iPod Touch application that lets users display a Keynote presentation on the device and control a Mac running a slide show from the device.
Unlike iLife, iWork '09 goes on sale today, said Schiller, at prices of $79 for a one-license copy and $99 for a five-license family pack. Customers who order it along with a new Mac, however, will pay $49.
"The most interesting part of all this, though, is iWork.com," said Gottheil, referring to the online component that Apple will release at an undetermined future date. "Right now, it looks like a reasonable commenting-style way of collaborating. It's no breakthrough, but if they continue to develop this, it will potentially be a lever to move into the collaboration market."
IWork.com, which is available now free of charge as a beta, allows users of iWork '09 to upload, then share, documents with others, as well as add comments to shared documents.
Apple has not set a timeline for iWork.com's release, nor has it said what it will charge for the final version.
Missing from Apple's keynote -- other than its CEO, who yesterday revealed that he is undergoing treatment for what he called a "hormone imbalance" -- was any word about a slew of rumors that had raced through the Apple community for the last several weeks. Subjects that went undiscussed included anticipated refreshes of the iMac and Mac Mini desktop machines, a smaller or cheaper version of the iPhone and a netbook-style computer.
"I expected to see a netbook," said Gottheil, who had speculated last month that Apple would announce a pair of smaller, lighter laptops to counter the growth of the cheapest PC notebooks.