Mac Attack Again!

Oh man. My decisions just got a bit harder, and a bit clearer, all at once. I will be getting a Mac, but which one? As I had read earlier, Apple was ready to ship the new iLife, so I held off a new computer purchase till I saw what was in store. Today, it came to light. Apple has upgraded the iMac line, and the Mac Mini's, came out with iLife '08, and iWorks '08 all in one day. The hardware got an upgrade overhaul much like the laptops did in June, so it's apparent that everything is being prepared for the new Leopard OS in October. More CPU horsepower, more RAM, more hard drive, more graphics - but surprisingly for a better price in some spots, or at the least the same price for better hard ware. The 24 inch iMac is now affordable at least. And the outsides have been overhauled as well, and the keyboard is redone too. I went and downloaded the video tour for the new iLife '08 from the Apple website. It's a 20 minute presentation of the new goodies, and I found myself saying "oh man that's cool" to myself several times while watching it. iMovie is a total overhaul and totally sweet. And for those wondering why anyone would pay $100 plus bucks for a .Mac account with 1GB of space, you now get 10GB of space. Don't know if it's worth the money, although the one click publishing from iWeb is pretty slick for those HTML weary. Then in iWorks, there is finally a spreadsheet Excel equivalent called Numbers, along with upgrades for Pages and Keynotes. However, if you're going to use an office application, go get OpenOffice or NeoOffice. It's free and legal, and works great. Now, I gotta decide how much MAC I can fit in the budget. What I'd like is a 24 inch iMac on the desk for my main machine horsepower and sweet monitor, and the low end MacBook for when I want portability. Bit much, I'd suppose. One can dream though. Of course, while we're waiting for Leopard in October I'll have to pay close attention to reviews and reports about this new hardware and software. Is it as good as it looks, or are there hiccups under the hood? Time will tell.