Macworld 2009's keynote by Apple's Senior Vice President Phil Schiller was as expected, scaled back in terms of product announcements and overall "awe." However, Apple didn't disappoint us with what they did announce, and we always like that. Some of the major announcements included a new 17-inch Macbook Pro, new versions of iLife and iWork, and even some changes to the iTunes Music Store.

To start off the keynote, Phil talked about the new iLife 09. He talked about the new iPhoto the most, which adds two new photo grouping features, Faces and Places. Faces is a new face detection feature which allows you to "tag" a person's face, similar to what you do in Facebook, and iPhoto will try to find other photos that have the same face (meaning the same person) and group them together. Now Apple disclosed that no face detection program is perfect, but they say they have it down pretty good. The other new feature, Places, lets you organize your photos according to where they were taken. If you're camera has a built-in GPS chip (which the iPhone does), iPhoto will automatically read the GPS coordinates and match that with a real location on a map and allow you to group together photos from similar locations. If you're camera doesn't have a GPS, you can manually geo-tag photos right in iPhoto to group them yourself. The location database uses Google Maps and iPhoto also now supports direct syncing with Flickr and Facebook. There are a few other additions as well, such as new themes for slide shows and a book printing feature.

The new 2009 version if iMovie includes a new precision editor which allows for easier editing of multiple clips and editing them together. You can now separate audio from video and overlay one over top of another clip. There is also a new video stabilization feature which attempts to automatically reduce a video's shakiness.

GarageBand 09 has some really cool new features, including video tutorials to teach you how to play various musical instruments. The program comes with nine basic lessons for both guitar and piano, but you can also purchase "artist lessons", which are $5 each and feature popular artists (such as Colbie Caillat, Sting, Fall Out Boy, etc) showing you how to play some of their popular songs.

All together, iLife 09 will ship at the end of January and will cost $79 for one copy and $99 for a family pack.

iWork 09 was also unveiled, which is Apple's productivity suite that rivals Microsoft's Office. The new version includes an updated Keynote, Apple's presentation tool. It now has new object animations, improved transitions, and some really slick looking charts and graphs. Now with the included iPod Touch/iPhone application, you can control your Keynote presentation with it. iWork Pages, their word processing program, now has a full screen view, mail merge with numbers, support for advanced math formulas, and some new templates as well.

iWork.com was also shown off, which is Apple's new online component to iWork and it allows you to share documents online. You can send documents right to another person via email from within iWork and that person can click the link and be taken to your document right in their Web browser (PC or Mac). Apple is currently offering iWork.com for free as part of a beta, but it will eventually be made a paid service down the line.

iWork 09 is available for purchase now and costs $49 with a new Mac, $79 for an individual version, and $99 for a family package. For $169, Apple is offering a Mac "box set", which includes iLife, iWork, and OS X Leopard.

The biggest unveil of Macworld 2009 was the new 17-inch MacBook Pro. The new notebook features the same unibody aluminum body as Apple's other new Macbooks and as well as the glass trackpad. The whole device weighs 6.6 pounds and is less than an inch thick! The screen features 1920x1200 resolution and has a 60% greater color gamut over previous models with a 700:1 contrast ratio. The screen is the usual glossy display, but for $50, you can get an anti-glare screen. The I/O ports are pretty standard and include three USB 2.0 ports, Firewire 800, a mini display port, and a battery gauge on the side as well. The specs are pretty nice as well and they include a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 320GB hard drive, and supports up to 8GB of 1066MHz DDR3 RAM. The new Macbook Pro features both nVidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics as well as the nVidia GeForce 9600GT discrete graphics with 512MB of memory, allowing you to switch between the two.

The biggest change to the Macbook Pro is the integrated battery, which Apple says will run up to 8 hours when using the integrated graphics chip. The new battery is much larger due to the fact that it isn't removable, which allowed for less mechanisms and such that is required for a removable battery. The Lithium polymer battery has a built-in chip that manages power going to the battery, so Apple says it can last for three times the number of charges that most batteries can...up to 1000 recharges. The starting model of the new Macbook Pro will cost $2799.

Lastly (and the announcement I talked about earlier this week and wanted to hear the most), iTunes will now be 100% DRM free by April, with 8 million of the 10 million total songs on iTunes already DRM free as of Tuesday. Also starting in April, Apple will offer songs for $.69, $.99, and $1.29. Schiller mentioned that most songs will be offered at the lower cost of $.69 than the higher $1.29. The new pricing models follows what record companies have wanted for a long time now, the ability to charge more for newer music.