After over 7 billion app downloads from the iOS app store, the crew in Cupertino is bringing the same model to a Mac near you. Steve Jobs said it would arrive in 90 days during today’s presentation, but on Apple’s official site, it’s simply listed as “Coming Soon.”

While Jobs mentioned that the Mac App Store won’t be the only place to purchase apps (third-party vendors will keep selling as before), this new feature could open the application floodgates for developers and consumers alike. After all, when was the last time you visited your local Apple Store or Best Buy and perused the software aisle?

Consumers can plan on enjoying the majority of the features we’ve come to love in the current iOS App Store, such as one-click downloads, immediate app installation, and automatic updates. The system of separating paid & free apps and dividing apps into categories (Games, Productivity, etc.) will provide the same browsing on the Mac that we’ve grown accustomed to on our iOS devices.

App description, reviews/ratings, and screenshots looked virtually identical to what you’ll see on the iPad. A slight altering of the store layout is the only difference that you’ll notice.

Can developers expect another app gold-rush? With a 70/30 revenue split, the Mac App Store will provide fresh means of distributing apps, ensure copyright is easier to track, and ease the marketing burden on devs. Like I mentioned before, as a consumer, I’m not racing to a brick-and-mortar store very often for an app these days, but I’m almost guaranteed to purchase at least a few with this new level of accessibility.

My first question is whether or not the versatility of the Mac will be compromised by the simplicity of the App Store and other features. Launchpad and Mission Control provide options that continue to blur the lines between OS X and iOS. Also, the coming multi-touch features, while helpful, seems to indicate a focus shift towards ease of use rather than variety of control.

How will Apple navigate this accessibility/versatility balance? Will consumers and developers both benefit from the Mac App Store in the same ways that they have from the iOS version? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

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Both models will share the aluminum unibody construction design, and a number of features, including Core 2 Duo CPUs, NVIDIA GeForce 320M GPUs, full-size keyboards, multi-touch trackpads (no button) and a FaceTime (not iSight any longer) camera.

The biggest internal change will be the use of solid-state storage across the lineup, which was a major rumor circulating about the new MacBook Air. The new storage system, which doesn’t appear to be upgradable, will have “instant on” capabilities similar to iOS devices, and be up to twice as fast as standard hard drives. This will also allow for a standby time of 30-freaking-amazing days.

Sporting an even more wedge-shaped design, the new 13.3-inch MacBook Air will have a backlit-LED with a resolution of 1440 x 900, making for a higher pixel density than the current MacBook Pro line. Only 0.68 inches at its thickest point, and 0.11 at its thinnest, it’ll be thinner than the previous MacBook Air. At 2.9 pounds, it’s also lighter than its predecessor.

In terms of battery life, it appears not even Apple can defy the laws of physics, as the new MacBook Air will only jump from five hours to seven hours under normal usage. However, Jobs said Apple is using a new method to test battery life that should produce more accurate results. Even so, battery life may be an issue with the 11.6-inch model, which is reported to get only five hours. However, that’s made up for by an even greater degree of portability, since the computer weighs only 2.3 pounds.

As for price, the new MacBook Air will start at $999 for the 11.6-inch model, the same price as the 13.3-inch MacBook. The new 13.3-inch MacBook Air will start at $1,299, $100 more than the low-end MacBook Pro. RAM is upgradable from the stock 2GB to 4GB for an extra $100. CPU speeds will start at 1.4 GHz on the low-end, 11.6-inch model, and go up to 2.13 GHz for an extra $100 on the 13.3-inch model. Here, many of the rumors, which asserted everything from 2GHz-plus Core 2 Duos to Intel’s Core i-series, were just plain wrong.

You won’t need to get an external optical drive to reinstall software with this generation of MacBook Air. Instead, Apple introduced a flash-based Software Reinstall Drive that ships with the computer. Just stick that into one of its two USB 2.0 ports, and you’re good to go. Other ports on the Air include a Mini DisplayPort, a MagSafe adapter, and a headphone jack.

Arguably, the CPU and battery life are probably the biggest disappointments in the new MacBook Air, but this is more than balanced by the aggressive pricing, at least for Apple, which appears to have no problems playing with the price divisions of its carefully segmented Mac portable lineup, and that may be the biggest change to come out of today.

When Steve Jobs said he believed “all notebooks will be like this one day,” (meaning no optical drives, flash storage, lightweight and small), you can bet that we’ll see the rest of the MacBook lineup take on these changes down the road.

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iMovie ’11

Judging by the amount of time devoted to the feature, the bit Apple wanted us to focus on with iMovie ’11 is the ability to create trailers for your home movies. It does look pretty cool; there are a series of built-in themes, with scores recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. You can change the studio name and logo, cast information and subtitles. While I’m not sure of the overall value this feature is going to be to the average user, I can see it being neat if the entire purpose of your movie project is to create a spoof trailer for YouTube.

Also demoed were new audio effects. Showing a cute demo of a kid holding an icicle saying, “Luke, I am your father,” Apple demoed changing the pitch of his voice to resemble Darth Vader’s. You can also easily adjust the volume of different clips to make them more uniform.

An easy way to create an instant replay has also been introduced. You just select an area, click Instant Replay, choose the speed, and boom, you’re on your way to making your own highlight reel. There’s also integration with Facebook and Vimeo built-in. One question I have is: Will it also pull Facebook comments like the new iPhoto does?

I’m a little disappointed they didn’t add better timeline support, but it’s clear to me now that iMovie is geared towards taking clips and shoving them together. So long as you’re not aiming to do much more than make home movies, iMovie ’11 seems like a great upgrade.

GarageBand ’11

My days of recording music are behind me, but like most amateur musicians, when I recorded with my band, we tended to suffer from timing issues. Inevitably, someone was slightly off, requiring retakes or a close-enough attitude. GarageBand now has a new groove-matching feature. You can select the best rhythm track — hopefully it’s the drummer, or you’ve likely got problems GarageBand can’t solve — then have all the tracks “snap” to this track. In the demo, a group of players that sounded like a cat on a hot tin roof magically sounded like seasoned studio musicians. I’m curious to see how this works in real life.

They seem to have really improved the music lessons portion of the app, too. You can play along with the lesson, and it shows how you’re doing. If you make a mistake, it shows in red. If your rhythm is off, it shows it in yellow. You can replay your lesson and keep a history to track your improvements over time.

iLife ’11 is available today. It’s free when you buy a new Mac, or $49 on its own.

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Slideshows have been enhanced with some new themes, including a new holiday theme. However, more impressive than holiday cards flying around on ribbons in front of a snowflake background: the new email feature where you can send sets of pictures with HTML templates directly from within iPhoto. It’s another feature that seems borrowed from the iPad.

The real benefit of including the email templates inside iPhoto is that you can rearrange the photos, resize them, and edit to your heart’s content before sending the message. Facebook and Flickr sharing have been updated as well, and iPhoto will automatically download pictures to your iPhoto library that have been added to these online services.

Printing books and cards has been improved. Books now use better application logic to decide how to lay out pictures, using the key photo from the iPhoto album for the cover and grouping together pictures that were taken at the same time and in the same place. iPhoto ’11 will also recognize the star ratings you’ve assigned to your photos, and will give preference to higher-rated pictures for the bigger spreads.

Letterpress cards are a new choice that use embossed paper to add a high-end custom-made feel to your printed cards. There’s even a video demonstration of how letterpress cards are made to explain this option to iPhoto users.

iPhoto ’11 looks like a solid upgrade with several enhancements that will make sharing photos by email, Facebook and Flickr easier, improve slideshows, and make printed books and cards even better. I think the full-screen interface looks interesting but I’ll wait to pass judgment until I’ve had a chance to use it. It’s clear that Apple is moving towards full-screen all around and is even featuring this approach in the next version of Mac OS X (10.7). Perhaps iPhoto ’11 will be the canary in the coal mine to show if this approach is a great innovation for the desktop or a simple gimmick designed to ride the coattails of the iPad.

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We’ll be providing live updates via Twitter, too, so check in with @theappleblog.

Here we are. All set for the big event. Apple put on a big spread at the cafeteria in Building 4 but I am hungry for good stuff Steve us going to share with us.

10.00 AM: Waiting for Steve.
10.01 AM: Here he is. Applause. We got some fun stuff to share with you this morning. It would be nice to bring in engineers to demo this to you. I would like to start with the state of the mac.
10.02: Tim Cook is on stage. Apple’s revenue, Mac made 33 percent of the revenue last year and it is a significant number by itself. That is $22 billion, the Mac company as a standalone company would be $110 on Fortune 500 companies. 13.7 million mac in FY 2010, 5x 2005 and 50 million users. We are growing 2.5 X the market. US consumer market, we have 20.7 percent

10.04: One in PC sold in retail in US is a Macintosh. We have a vibrant developer community. 600,000 registered Mac Developers. Adding 30,000 developers a month. We have developers like Valve (people behind Steam)

10.05: Autodesk is on a Mac and we have coveted that and we couldn’t be more pleased. We have developers who continue to develop on Mac. Office 2011 and Outlook on Mac, it is exceptionally good.
10.06: Fueling the Mac momentum is the incredible push in the Apple retail. 75 million visitors and sold 2.8 million mac in last year. 50 percent are new to Mac. 318 stores in 11 countries. Stores in China are highest trafficked of any of our stores.

10.08: Steve is back! Moving on to new products. iLife is widely regarded as the best suite of digital life applications. You can do amazing things with photos, videos, music. We keep improving it every year. We are now introducing iLife 11.

10.09: iPhoto 11 which has Facebook enhancements, full screen modes, made it really easy to email photos from within iPhone. New slideshows and big leap in books. We are printing 2 million (photo) books every years. We are adding Letterpress cards to this. Phil Schiller is on stage demoing it. New full screen places view. Location oriented photo collections are pretty awesome.

10.22: Steve is back! That is awesome. This is why we do what we do.  Recaps iPhoto. We are really excited about these new features.

10.23: iMovie 11. The number one request was better audio editing and we can do extremely sophisticated editing easily. All new audio editing. One step effects. People finder and news and sports themes and the ability to construct movie trailers without much effort. On stage, Randy Ubillois, chief architect of video applications.

10.35: Demo of iMovie is over. Sharing in YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo.

10.37: New Garageband 11 and it helps you fix the rhythm in your music. It has stuff like Flex Time, Groove Matching , More Guitar amps and more. Apple product marketing Xander Soren is on stage and demoing the new software. Groove Matcher is like spell checker for bad rhythms.

10.46: 5 million people are using Garageband.

10.47: iLife 11 — all this amazing engineering has gone into these products. Free with new macs and cost $49 for upgrades. It is available today.

10.48: Steve just gave props to the engineering team behind iLife 11

10.49: Since we have introduced in 4 months. 19 million devices with Facetime. #1 request is to do Facetime calling from and to Mac. It is here. Steve demoing it. This is so simple. Nothing to set up. Simple demo. I think people are going to like it.

10.51: We are going to beta release of Facetime for Mac today. Start Facetime calling. New Logo too.

10:52: The entre for today, sneak peak of where we are going with Mac. Seven releases in one year. Today we are giving you a preview of the eight version of Mac OS X. It is called Lion.

10.53: What we have done is started with Mac OS X, created a version called iOS and invented new things. We have perfected it and now it is used in iPad. We are inspired by those innovations in iPhone and iPad and bring them back to Mac OS X. We want to bring those “back to the mac.”

10.54: Multitouch gestures can be important on the Mac too. App store has revolutionized and why not Mac too. Full screen apps. App Home Screens. Apps on the iPad on autosave and data is constantly saved and when you launch apps, they auto resume. And that be great on Mac too.

10.56: Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical, but after a short time, you start to fatigue. It is ergonomically terrible. Hence we have pads. And that is what we are doing with notebooks. A multitouch trackpad in a mouse and now pure play device.

10.57: 7 Billions apps have been downloaded from the App store. We are brining to back to the mac and we will have a Mac app store. It will best place to discover apps. One click downloads. Same free and paid apps. (70/30 split) and automatic installation and automatic app updates. Apps licenses for use on all your personal macs.

10.59: Four cool inventions – Expose, Full Screen Apps, Dashboard and Spaces — and this is great but as we have added full screen apps so we have done is combined them and it is called Mission Control and navigate the mac. Craig Federighi, VP of Mac Engineering.

11.04: The app home screen in OS-X Lion. looks pretty bad and I am not sure I like it. Bleh! I like the full screen mode in apps and it makes good use of the screen estate.

11.06: Mission Control is pretty sweet and I want it now. One click access to all apps.

11.08: Steve is back. Really excited about it. Again, a whole new way of getting apps and launching and finding apps. We will unveil it over time. Our plan is to release it in Summer 2011.

11.09: Mac App store is going to great for user and we were going to launch it on Snow Leopard and will launch in 90 days from today. We are taking app submissions in November.

11.11: There is one more thing and it back to the mac theme. Virtuous circle of creating iOS and now being back to Mac. Just like that philiopsohy it can have benefit in hardware. When Macbook meets an iPad.

11.12: iPad has instant on, great battery life, amazing standby time, thin and light and no optical or hard drives. What would happen if a Macbook and an iPad hooked up? It is the most amazing thing we have created. Macbook Air. It is gorgeous and it is the future of notebooks. It is really stunning and it is really small. It is 0.68 inch thin and at the narrowed point it is 0.11 inch and weighs 2.9 lbs.

11.14: Full unibody. 13.3 inch and high-res LED display and has more pixels than Macbook Pro 15 inch. 1440 X 900pixels. Full size Multi-Touch trackpad. No optical drive and no hard drive. We have gone to flash storage.

11.15: We have gone to flash storage. Why? it is instant on. It is unto 2x faster and it is 90% smaller and lighter. It is completely silent. More reliable. We are the largest user of Flash memory in the world. 7 hours of battery life on wireless web and 30 days standby time.

11.17: we are putting Flash right on the board. 802.11n WiFi, Core2 Duo. And a massive battery. We have taken eveyrhthing we have learned from miniaturizing from iPad and iPhone and crammed it into a board.

11.18: A younger brother,11.6 inch. Smaller. 2.3 pounds. High res 1366 cx 768 pixels. 5 hours of battery life and same 30 days of standby time. We see these as next generation of MacBooks. It is going to cost $999 for 11.6 model. More pricer models. 13.3 inch top end will cost $1599. Both are available starting today.

Guess who is going to the apple store right now!

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Here’s a quote from the document about what you’ll need to tune in:

Apple® will broadcast its October 20 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on October 20, 2010 at http://www.apple.com.

Honestly, I can’t believe it took them this long to do this, and I have a hard time believing they’ll ever go back to the old way. We’ll be watching right along with you later this morning. And tune in here for our coverage of the event as it unfolds.

While those basically guarantee what many already suspected, there’s also another new category, a placeholder called “Reserved 10 20.” It’s obviously a reference to today’s date, but little else is clear beyond that. Maybe Apple has an additional surprise product in its pocket, a true “one more thing?” Or, it could be for Apple’s new operating system, and remains unnamed because Apple wants to make extra sure not to give away the name before later today.

Engadget also posted additional details about the new MacBook Air ahead of today’s announcement, which it says come from a trusted source. It’s basically a full spec sheet for the 11.6-inch version we’ll supposedly see alongside a revamped 13.3-inch model:

• 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (with a 2.33GHz option).
• 2GB of memory.
• No optical drive.
• Mini DisplayPort, USB, and SD on the left, and MagSafe and another USB on the right.
• New, single-piece button trackpad, like on the Pros.
• Smaller footprint, but same thickness as the current MacBook Air.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see this thing unveiled this afternoon. My 12-inch PowerBook is long due for retirement. Tune in here at TheAppleBlog for coverage of today’s event, which starts at 10 AM Pacific, or 1 PM Eastern.

Update: As of 12:15 p.m. EDT this afternoon, the Discussions pages have all been yanked, showing a “not found” error. It’s likely they will reappear after this afternoon’s event, and apparent that someone really did jump the gun and posted them too soon.

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iLife

iPhoto

iPhoto is my picture storage solution, especially now that I use Snow Leopard’s Services to allow any app to pull images from iPhoto. This is very handy in PowerPoint; I have an event called Presentation Images: images I think are great to be used in presentations. PowerPoint can’t access iPhoto on its own, but using Services, it can.

Ever since iPhoto went to the event-based storage system, though, it’s been driving me nuts on imports. It’s pretty rare I’ve gone to an actual event. Instead I end up taking a few pictures of something interesting on my iPhone. Instead of just automatically creating Events, I’d like to see some greater intelligence here. At the import screen I should be able to specify which photos actually are part of an event, and which should go into a slush pile I can sort out later.

I’d also like to see better integration with Flickr and Facebook. I want iPhoto to go both ways, and also download any photos I’ve added to that set via Flickr or Facebook from other sources.

iMovie

Like many people, I mourned when iMovie took away the timeline. iMovie ’09 is a little better, but I’d still like to see it bridge the gap to Final Cut Express with better timeline integration.

I’d also like to see it become a better screencasting tool. Now that Snow Leopard can record my screen, I’d like to see them borrow some of the features of ScreenFlow and integrate them.

iWork

Pages

It’s unlikely my biggest annoyance with Pages — the inability to quickly open a Word document, make a change, and save without needing to export — is likely to ever get changed due to how Pages handles importing and exporting. I can dream, though, and in my dream the process works much more smoothly.

One area I think Pages is seriously lacking in is academic uses. While Pages ’09 introduced easier citation and equation management, those features require third-party add ons. Word 2011, due out Oct. 26, handles both of those in-app. Apple really shouldn’t be slacking on features that could help it penetrate the education market even further.

Numbers

Numbers often gets a bad rap because it’s not Excel, but I’ve personally never hit many walls in Numbers. That said, I’m pretty much the app’s target audience: someone who does light billing and spreadsheet work, or maybe needs to gussy up a chart for a presentation. That said, the biggest complaint I tend to run across from others who are more demanding with their spreadsheet software is “no pivot tables.” So, um, go pivot tables?

Keynote

I don’t really have a big wish-list for Keynote, although PowerPoint 2011′s layering feature would be very handy. The biggest problem I have with Apple’s presentation tool isn’t really with the desktop application; it’s with handing off presentations to the iPad. I tend to use a lot of non-standard fonts in my presentations, which get completely mangled when I show them on the iPad. So, what I’d love in Keynote is the ability to save a version for the iPad that will properly display my fonts, let me drive the presentation, and make any last-minute changes.

Inter-app-operability

Office for PC has one feature I’ve been longing for in iWork: the OLE framework, which makes it very easy to embed editable elements. So, I can drop an Excel table or chart into Word and be able to make changes to that. iWork would really benefit from better cross-app integration.

I don’t think my demands are too extreme, but I also have little faith that we’ll see many of these changes implemented, which is a shame, because in my opinion, these are the major problems holding the iSuites back from a user experience perspective, something Apple should be all about. If rumors are right, we’ll see how far off the mark Apple is when iWork ships on Oct. 20.

What are you hoping for or expecting from updated iWork and iLife suites?

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Bookmaker expert Mickey Richardson, CEO of Bookmaker.com, one of the largest sports odds-making sites in the world, and his team of experts have calculated the likelihood of what we might see at the event.

So what do the pros think will and won’t happen Wednesday?

An 11-inch version of Macbook Air
YES -750 88.5%
NO +150 40%

Updated iWork & iLife
YES -500 15%
NO +100 50%

FaceTime for iChat in new version of OS X
YES -750 88.5%
NO +150 40%

Next version of OS X will be called Lion
YES +150 40%
NO -750 88.5%

Note: For those unfamiliar with sports betting, the +/- Indicates the Return on the wager. The percentage is the likelihood that response will occur. For example: Betting on the candidate least likely to win would earn the most amount of money, should that happen.

Tune in tomorrow for TheAppleBlog’s full coverage.

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