Apple unveiled a new lineup of desktop and notebook computers to make preparations for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

The updates include two new iMac all-in-one desktop computers featuring bigger 21.5-inch and 27-inch wide screen displays in a new edge-to-edge glass design and seamless all aluminum enclosure.

The new iMacs, starting at $1,199, will be shipped with a new wireless Magic Mouse, billed by Apple as the world's first mouse featuring the company's multi-touch technology which has been used in iPhone and other products. The Magic Mouse, which comes standard with the new iMac models, will also be available as a Mac accessory at $69.

Apple also introduced a new Mac Mini, a desktop computer sold without a display and keyboard. Starting at $599, the new Mac mini is faster, offers more storage and comes standard with double the memory.

Apple's notebook computer line was also revamped with the launch of a new MacBook, which inherited technology and design features from the company's high-end MacBook Pro models but still starts at the price of $999. The new MacBook has a durable polycarbonate unibody design featuring an LED-backlit display, a glass multi-touch trackpad and built-in battery for up to seven hours of battery life. Apple has once again dropped the popular high-speed firewire port from the MacBook line. The 13" unibody aluminum MacBook later gained a firewire 800 port and was rebranded as a MacBook Pro.

Another "all-new" iMovie. ’06 was feature-rich and complicated. ’08 was simple, but lost some features. Now ’09 is simple and has lots of whiz-bang features. The timeline has not returned, but the new iWorks is impressive. This version of iMovie makes very complex operations quite simple, but also makes simple operations very complex. Warning: it may not run well on any Mac that is not practically new (and has plenty of RAM).

iPhoto is more complex. Faces and Places join Events (from ’08) to make iPhoto a powerful tool for organizing and for dazzling others with spiffy slide shows, and more. For those who never liked or understood Events, you may get dizzy with iPhoto ’09. Remember, you can always ignore everything "newfangled" and just use the Albums like always. But for most of you, some training in iPhoto will make Events lovable and Faces (face recognition) irresistible. Places (organizing your pix by where they were taken) won't have a lot of mass appeal, but for some will be very important. Warning: this program may not handle big photo libraries well on anything but the newest Apple computers with lots of RAM.

All the iLife and iWorks applications have more features, as the applications continue to mature.

iTunes without DRM (copy-protected) music will mean the music you buy can move to any computer or device you own. This is a good thing, as life gets complicated when you can't play your own music.