Apple’s new product announcements — upgraded iMacs, a somewhat upgraded .Mac online service, and a new “2008″ version of iWork and iLife — may not represent the “tipping point” that persuades new PC purchasers that they should buy a Mac instead of a PC. But it will probably eliminate any doubt or remorse on the part of first-time Mac purchasers who might otherwise have second thoughts like, “Jeez, maybe I should have gotten a Dell laptop instead, with Vista and Microsoft Office 2008.” More importantly, it may persuade a few hundred thousand more existing Mac users to abandon the Mac version of Microsoft Office, and move entirely into the Apple world.

It’s not really a relevant issue with regard to iLife: after all, if you’re taking photographs, composing music, or creating websites with a Mac, there’s not much chance that you’ll be remorseful that you’ve foresaken the Windows products in this area. For everyone but the serious power-users, tools like Apple’s iPhoto are more than sufficient; for example, I consider myself a reasonably competent digital photographer, and iPhoto is sufficient for 99% of the pictures that I need to edit, store, and catalog. For the rare exceptions, I’ve got the super-sophisticated tools like Adobe Photoshop; and while there may be obscure top-end photo-editing or catalog-management programs that only run on Windows, I haven’t missed them at all.

It’s iWork that’s going to be more interesting to watch. Most imporant, Apple has finally added a spreadsheet program, numbers, as a competitor for Excel. For my own work, 95% (or more) of Excel’s sophisticated features aren’t relevant; I don’t even use macros. So when my copy of iWork arrives in a couple of days (I ordered it this afternoon, of course), I’m planning to retire Excel unless there’s something seriously inadequate about Apple’s program.

As it turns out, I do much more writing and presentations than number-crunching, so I’m much more interested in Apple’s third-generation products “Pages” and “Keynote” (and because I didn’t think the first-generation or second-generation versions were quite powerful enough for my needs, I’m also aware that the first-generation version of Numbers may prove inadequate).  Briefly looking through the “new features” list, I noticed a huge new addition: change-tracking, which has been invaluable for many of the “shared” documents that I develop and edit collaboratively with co-workers. Interestingly, I thought that Pages 2006 and the new Pages 2008 were missing a “table of contents” feature, which I use frequently in Microsoft Word; but it turns out that that feature has existed since Pages 2006 without my even being aware of it. I think it still lacks the ability to automatically generate an index at the end of a long document, but I don’t use that feature very often; and there may well be a few other obscure features that I need once a month, but not on a day-to-day basis.

Both iWork and iLife retail for $79, by the way, which is much cheaper than Microsoft Office. And not only are they cheaper, but they start up much more quickly, and operate in a frisky, user-friendly fashion that constantly makes me wonder why I’ve been willing to tolerate the ponderous, sluggish Office applications for such a long time. I suspect the same will be true of Keynote, Apple’s replacement for Powerpoint, but I won’t know that for sure until I have a chance to play with it a bit more.

Since I interact with a large number of people who are still captives of the Dark Side, I suspect that one of the larger issues for me may be the convenience and accuracy of document-exchange (i.e., imports and exports) between the Apple iWork universe and the Microsoft Office universe. In the 2006 version of Apple’s products, I found that the document exchange worked reasonably well for simple documents, but often hiccuped when dealing with somewhat more complex documents.  It will be interesting to see how well things work with the vintage-2008 products.

I’ll also be curious to see how well the iLife products (especially iPhoto and the WebGallery) products interface with my new iPhone … my hunch is that Apple will have done a pretty good job in this area, for the simple reason that they control all of the underlying technology.

All in all, it looks like a good day to be an Apple fan; over the next couple weeks, I’ll let you know how well the advertising matches up with reality…