Apple, once again, had their game on today as Steve Jobs delivered a keynote address at this year’s Macworld conference in San Francisco, chock full of new Apple goodness.

I know my PC friends think that Apple aficionados drink the fruity kool-ade on a regular basis, but come on, you’ve got to admit that no other company is producing stuff like this, and absolutely no one in the PC world is generating software and hardware that’s as elegant and drool-worthy as Apple. It’s hard to believe after all these years that PC stuff just looks as crappy as it does, compared to stuff on the Mac platform. Oh well, that’s a post for another day.

Today, Apple introduced a slew of products, including updates to the iLife apps (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, and Garageband), all of which are very nice (HD in iMovie is particularly note worthy, as are the new features of iPhoto). iWork is a new productivity suite (hard to say suite, exactly, since it’s only two apps at this point) and includes Keynote 2 (nice upgrade), and Pages, a word processor with definite page layout leanings. Both suites retail at the very attractive price-point of only $79 and hit the streets next Friday, the 22nd.

>Final Cut Express HD is nice, and the addition of Soundtrack as a standard feature is sweet. The preview of Tiger, shipping sometime this spring, was as cool as ever, and should be a big hit.

But for my money, the two major announcements were the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini.

After essentially demolishing the high and mid-range market for MP3 players, Jobs says “now we’re going to go after the rest.” And true to form, Apple’s taken a different tack on how to do just that. Instead of producing another run of the mill flash ROM based player like every other Chinese manufacturer, they threw out what wasn’t really important (which also happened to be the expensive component), the screen.

The simplicity of the iPod Shuffle is intriguing. 512MB or 1GB of memory, five buttons and a USB connector. One LED. No screen.

The premise is most people use their MP3 players completely sequentially, or on random (or “shuffle”) play. Why waste BOM dollars, battery life, and physical space with a screen? With only about 240 songs on the largest model, there’s really no need for it.

Yes, my first impression when hit with this concept was “huh?” But the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. And gee whiz, 12 hours of rechargeable battery life, and the size of a couple sticks of Wrigley’s and the weight of four quarters.

Basically, Apple’s taken the USB key concept that everyone’s on board with and placed a MP3 player in to boot. And at $99 for a half-gig model and $149 for the big brother, it’s cheaper than most anything else out there in the category. And perfect for certain uses: a walk or jog in the morning, an hour drive across town, etc. If you were going to plop down some cash for a 1GB USB key, get one of these instead. The added functionality will be worth it.

You can begin to see where Apple was going back when they launched the iTunes Music Store and said “your iTMS bought music can be put on as many iPods as you have”… they expect people to have one of these in addition to their full-sized iPod or iPod mini. Incremental revenue. And they’ll make a ton off of it. You may be tempted to think that Apple’s losing money on this little gem to get in the game. Betcha dimes to donuts they’re still making 25 to 30 points a pop on it.

Then there’s the Mac Mini. This one’s even more intriguing. Think of how many PC users Apple has managed to get to drop a few C notes on iPods over the past year and a half. I would imagine a good portion of the BILLION dollars Apple’s made off of the 10 million iPods shipped so far are to PC owners. And the halo effect is now realized, as there’s a genuine Mac available in almost the same price range (cheaper than the 60GB iPod Photo, even). How many PC users do you think are sitting on the fence and will now jump into the Mac market? More than a couple, I’d wager. I imagine the thought process goes something like this: “A simple A/B switch and my shiny, tiny new Mac is using the same monitor as my old dusty Dell. I’ll give that a whirl.”

And the new iLife is included. The only weird thing I see in this scenario is that they chose not to include iWork in the bundle. Give people a way to switch with almost no software investment (by including iWork’s presentation and word processing software) and you’ve got a home run. Sure, AppleWorks is included, but it’s a marginal OS X app at best. If there were two things I’d change about the package, it’d be to throw iWork in the box and double the standard RAM to 512MB.

Now here’s what I find intriguing about the Mac Mini: this thing is destined, in my opinion, for the media center. A couple of minor tweaks and a little software and the thing is practically a TiVo that’s HD ready. Of course, I’m jumping ahead a little… speculate if you will what’ll be possible once Tiger, H.264 and Quicktime 7.0 is released (all in Tiger). Hmmmmm….