So, the Schillernote was yesterday, and while not as flashy as Jobs standard, it was a fine delivery. I never have really cared a whole lot for Phil Schiller, but he’s definitely competent. ‘Nuff said.

The main three announcements from the keynote yesterday were iLife ’09, iWork ’09, and the new unibody MacBookPro 17″. Here’s my quick take on each.

iLife ’09.
Very impressive upgrade. I am very anxious to try out the Faces and Places functionality of the new iPhoto ’09. Face detection and recognition technology has come a long way in the past few years… I hope the functionality in iPhoto performs half as well as it did in the keynote. Very impressive. Additionally, I’m looking forward to Flickr integration, and the bi-directional syncing with facebook looks very interesting.

iMovie also looks to have some nice new features. Although I don’t personally use iMovie at all (I cut in Final Cut Studio), my son does and it looks like a very nice upgrade. I’m looking at solid-state-based camcorders, and right now it’s a lot easier to deal with AVCHD in iMovie than it is in FCP. Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to have a Core Duo-based Mac to use iMovie, so my middle son’s iMac G5 is out. Hmmm.

Not sure completely what to make of the Garage Band upgrade, Lessons, but it could be cool. We’ll see about that one. No upgrade to speak of to iDVD, not too surprising.

Lastly, Apple made some nice upgrades to iWeb, most notably the ability to upload directly (via FTP) to servers other than .Mac and the ability to work with multiple sites. Nice. Hopefully the upload function is smart enough to only upload the changed content.

iWork ’09
I’m not a huge iWork user, but I do occasionally use Pages and Numbers, and use Keynote quite a bit. The main interesting point on the first two (for me) is the ability to share documents in the cloud via the new iWork website. Keynote, on the other hand, has a number of new features that make it even more snazzy and distances it even further from Power Point.

MacBook Pro 17
OK, I have to admit, I’m starting to drool a bit more today than I did yesterday over the new unibody MacBook Pro 17. My current MBP 17 is a little over 2 years old, and while it remains the best portable Mac I have ever owned, as I run down the specs on the new box I find myself jumping over to e-bay to see what the resell value would be towards a new one.

Things I noticed: faster CPU, 8GB max RAM, larger HDD, higher resolution screen, smaller, lighter, longer battery, new display connector. If anyone out there has about $4k burning a hole in their pocket, I’ll take one with a 24″ LED Cinema display, m’kay? thankyouverymuch.

The only other real thing of note is the removal of DRM (finally) from almost all of the iTunes catalog, with a feature to have iTunes analyze your purchases and give you a bottom line price to upgrade your library to 256kbps non-DRM. Mine was $68. Not bad. Remains to be seen if this will extend to movies any time soon. And, it appears there are certain strings attached to the upgrade.

Noticeably Missing
No upgrade to AppleTV. No preview of iPhone 3.0. No preview of Snow Leopard, nor even a mention that it’s still coming. And although highly anticipated, no Mac Mini upgrade.

I’d have to concur with the general consensus and and say the announcements are lackluster. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait to play around with the new iPhoto, iMovie and Keynote apps, and I do want a MBP 17 (just let me know if you need the shipping address). But I expected at least a little lip service to some other items.

And macrumors.com getting hacked, while a crime, was funny.