The keynote address for MacWorld, the twice-yearly event where Apple makes most of their major announcements, was two days ago.

The biggest news in my opinion was iLife ’04, the new edition of their consumer digital media software, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and one new addition: GarageBand.

First, the worst part of iLife ’04 — the slogan they’re using to promote it: “It’s like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.” Apparently this is meant to play off of Microsoft’s simultaneous announcement of their next release of Office for Mac and imply that you can use Office all day at work and then come home and use iLife to work with your digital music, movies, and photos. But it always instills a fear in me of some dystopian nightmare where I have to use Microsoft Office For The Rest Of My Life.

But, fortunately, there’s plenty of good. In addition to needed updates to the existing apps, the new app, GarageBand, looks fantastic. It combines easy recording, composing, mixing, and editing with tons of prerecorded loops, lots of pro quality instruments (give your $100 Yamaha the sound of a $50,000 grand piano), and fifteen different guitar “amps” to make your guitar sound like a variety of miked amplifiers.

There’s probably nothing you could do with GarageBand that you couldn’t do before with sufficient expense and effort on a Mac or PC with lots of equipment and software. But Apple has combined extremely high quality loops, instruments and effects into a single app with an intuitive interface, and is selling it as part of the $49 iLife suite (or it comes free with any Mac).

Now if they can come up with a way to allow garage bands to put their GarageBand output onto the iTunes Music Store, that will be revolutionary.

But MacWorld wouldn’t be MacWorld without some controversy, and the big one this time is the new iPod mini, a smaller, lower-capacity, cheaper, and more colorful version of the most important Apple product of the last few years.

The near-universal consensus is that the thing doesn’t make sense at 4 gigs for $249 when one can get the 15 gig regular iPod for $299. I may be wrong on this one, but my guess is that the naysayers will be proven wrong.

I wonder how much overlap there is between those claiming the iPod mini will be the next Cube (the ill-fated, overpriced but super-stylish Apple computer of a few years ago) and those that were claiming, two-years ago, that the original iPod was going to be the next Cube. With a $399 price tag at introduction, the consensus on the original iPod was that it would flop (even if it was pretty cool). That obviously hasn’t been borne out.

I think a lot of the problem is that the doom-predictors are treating iPod consumers as Rational Economic Agents who, intent on maximizing their storage capacity while minimizing their monetary outlay, are endeavoring to buy right at the peak of the cost-capacity curve. I don’t think that type of view is accurate of many consumer markets and certainly not of the iPod market: the iPod, like most Apple products (iLife ’04 is an exception), has never been a winner just on a pure cost-to-technical-capability ratio. When the original 5 gig iPod was announced, there were tons of people befuddled that anyone would buy one of them when they could, for a little bit less, get a unit that was “a little larger” (than a portable CD player) and had more storage capacity, too.

I don’t have numbers, but I would guess the average person’s entire computer music library is less than (or at least not too much more than) 4 gigs, which still amounts to around 1000 songs. The iPod mini is over 40% smaller than the regular iPod. And it comes in five different colors. Of anodized aluminum.

I’m trying to be skeptical but I just can’t convince myself that Apple won’t find plenty of buyers at $249; then, when that market is tapped out and the price of one-inch 4 gigabyte hard drives drops, they’ll be able to cut the price to $199 and really effectively go after the lower end music player market.

Time will tell, but (and this is from someone who initially thought the original iPod had a good chance of being the next Cube) my prediction is that it will do very well.

Enough fanboyism. You have to give me this at least a couple of times a year, though.