The Stevenote wasn't all Tater Tots and Twizzlers, though; you may not have noticed it at the time, but Steve tiptoed past a little fact that might have some Mac users leaning perilously close to Disgruntled Territory. It's nothing so nasty as the dual-USB iBook logic board failures that has malcontented zombies converging on the Moscone Center even as we speak, but we imagine at least some of the Mac-using undead might have a few choice words for the bigwigs in Cupertino when all's said and done. Nasty words. Hurtful words. Words like "nnnnnggghhhhrrr" and "mmuuuuuuhhhaaaa."

You no doubt thrilled to the revelation of all those nifty new features in iPhoto 4. (If you're wondering what happened to iPhoto 3, sources tell us that it kept showing up to work drunk and harassing the interns.) The new version packs Smart Albums, photo ratings, Rendezvous photo sharing, and possibly the best new feature since the application's debut: what Apple describes as "blazing fast performance," and what we hope we'll be able to describe honestly as "enough speed not to make our dual-800 MHz G4 drag like a Yugo hauling a bus full of hippos and sacks of nails." Plus its enhanced slideshow options include that oh-so-cool rotating cube transition, so you don't have to spring for Keynote or mess with Panther's Fast User Switching to see it.

And hey, how about that new iMovie? More transitions and effects, trimming of video clips right in the timeline, native iSight support, simplified sharing of your finished movies, audio scrubbing... the list goes on and on. (Well, no, actually, the list pretty much stops there, but still, that's one darn fine update.) And iDVD? Now it has a navigation map, twenty new themes, transitions between screens, and support for up to two hours of new pro-encoded video on each DVD.

Meanwhile, iTunes is... well, it's still the same old iTunes, but at least there's some new stuff kicking around in the iTunes Music Store, like Billboard charts and half a million songs. That... that sort of counts, right? Ah, whatever-- GarageBand more than takes up the slack.

So all in all, iLife '04 is a solid upgrade to the digital lifestyle suite, and at $49 it's a steal. But that won't appease some people when they discover that Steve conveniently glossed over the fact that you can no longer download its components anymore. So long, free ride.

Well, okay, that's not entirely true; iDVD was never really downloadable to begin with, and GarageBand is new, so you can't judge by that. And iTunes is still free to download, but then again, if it weren't, Apple wouldn't sell nearly as many iPods. iPhoto and iMovie, on the other hand, used to be free downloads, but now appear to be available only via iLife; even the download pages for the previous versions have been yanked. And to get iLife, you're either going to have to shell out $49 for a retail copy, or spend considerably more than that on a whole new Mac.

It's not the end of the world, of course, but yes, it's one more example of Apple taking a free product or service (like iTools), getting people hooked, and then charging for it later (.Mac). Sure, you get more for your money, like a great new version of iDVD and a kick-ass music creation and recording app that should probably cost more than $49 all on its lonesome, but if you're not the musical type, you don't own a SuperDrive, and all you want is a version of iPhoto that'll let you scroll through 2,000 photos before your great-grandchildren drop dead of old age, you now have to spend forty-nine clams like the rest of us. All we can say is, thank heaven there's a $79 Family Pack.

Of course, we'd feel even better about it if we didn't think we'd have to buy iLife '05 next January. Progress bites, huh?