Apple announced the new iMac today. It’s not as boxy or ugly as it’s predecessor, thankfully. Dumping the 17” screen in favor of 20 and 24” models, the iMac is made out of aluminum, glass and sports a very thin keyboard that comes in wired and Bluetooth versions, along with 2 stock 2 USB 2.0 ports built in. Under the hood? A 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor with ATI’s Radeon HD 2600 Pro graphics card, 1 terabyte of storage space, 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.0, and 1GB of RAM (the new iMacs support up to 4GB RAM). (Catching my breath)

You’d be hard pressed to figure out how they stuffed it all in, but it also comes with four USB 2.0 ports (that’s six total if you count the keyboard), FireWire 400 & 800 ports, standard Ethernet, video out, built-in iSight camera, and slot loading SuperDrive.

Also included is the stellar iLife ‘08 package updated with a completely redesigned versions of iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band. The iMovie interface promises to edit and deliver movies in minutes, not hours, with scrubbing capability on all clips, expanded format support with AVCHD and HDV plugins built in, video library organized by event, and ability to publish movies directly to You Tube and of course, to the iPhone. That’s kickin’.

The iPhoto has similar organization by event features and can still publish to book, website, and more. Garage Band has a either the sound timeline view or a virtual stage which allows you to jam with the loops in a very easy to use interface, has multi take recording which lets you choose the best takes, and it even creates a sheet music look based on what you input into it.

Cost for the 24” iMac fully loaded is your typical, Apple-sque $2,299.00 with the low budget (if there can be such a thing) 20” starting at just under $1,200.

And for all you iMac lovers out there, the rumors of its imminent death are premature as Apple announced an upgrade to a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Wow.

Video of the keynote is here.