Live coverage of Apple’s last ever Macworld keynote – updated

6.30 Well, that’s it – as Tony Bennet serenades us, I’m off to hit the Macworld floor before jumping on a plane to CES in Vegas. Stay tuned!

Check this story for UK pricing for all the new Apple products, including the new iTunes pricing

Click here for my first impressions of iLife 09

6.29 To summarise: new iLife with particularly cool new iMovie and iPhoto features; new iWork (yawn); new 17in MacBook Pro; end of iTunes DRM (yey!) and iPhone music donwloading over 3G. Hardly an empty keynote, then – but hardly a barnstormer. And no cameo from Steve…

6.28 iTunes Music Store now supports downloading over 3G networks for the same price – no need to find a Wi-Fi hotspot. And it starts today. This is great news, but will it be enough to save this keynote? No Steve Jobs, no significant new hardware… It’s certainly not going out of Macworld on a high.

And yet there’s enough in what has been announced – particularly the end of DRM, 3G downloads and the new iLife – to make it more than just a damp squib. Goodbye Macworld!

6.25 And finally… yey!… iTunes. D’oh. Over 6 billion songs have been sold and iTunes is the number one channel for music in the US. So what’s new? 3 things:

– price – finally iTunes is giving the music companies more flexibility 69c, 99c and $1.29.

– iTunes Plus – the DRM-free, high-quality service that’s the only part of iTunes you should be using. As of today, 8m of the songs on iTunes are DRM free. And by the end of this quater all 10m songs on iTunes will be DRM free. At last!

– And finally – iTunes on iPhone is changing.

6.22 The new MacBook is available at the end of the month and costs the same as the old one – $2799, details on the pic below.

6.18 The battery apparently lasts 3 times as long – 1000 charges, or up to 5 years. Makes me think I shouldn’t charge my battery every day…

6.14 The new battery apparently has 8 hour life – but it’s not removeable. This is in order to give it more space for more battery life, but will infuriate some. Still, if 8 hours is true… that’s 3 hours longer than the old Pro.

6.13 the new MacBook Pro is available with a matt-finish screen as well as the usual glossy display. It features the new mini display connector rather than a proper DVI connection, which is disappointing. It has up to 8GB of RAM, the multi-touch pad, etc etc.

6.10 And finally – the new 17in Macbook Pro. Oh. Like the other MacBooks it has a unibody enclosure etc etc. But it’s nothing really new. It’s the world’s thinnest (under 1in) and  (6lbs) 17in laptop.

6.09 iWork.com is the beginning of a new service and it’s free… for now. It will, however, become a paid-for service once the kinks have been ironed out. Hmmm. The beta launches today and you get to it through iWork 09.

6.05 Phil’s giving us a demo of iWork.com (pic below) which pretty much replicates the iWork experience in any browser (although given the struggles with MobileMe, let’s not get too excited!). It seems like a pretty good idea but it’s not as web-native (or free) as Google Docs – other people can’t edit your documents, only comment on them.

6.03 No wait, there’s more iWork stuff… iWork.com beta, which allows you to upload and share documents online. They can add comments and notes, and download a copy of the documents.

6.02 iWork is $99, or $49 with a new Mac. It ships today. But don’t rush out to the stores just yet… there’s definitely one more thing. iLife 09 needs Leopard – so you can get iLife, iWork and Leopared in teh Mac Box Set for $169.

5.59 You can now put math equations into Pages documents. Really. There are new themes too. Tum-te-tum. Next up…. ah, Numbers. The ‘fun and easy-to-use’ spreadsheet. It’s got table categories!

5.56 There are new features in Pages, too, although I have to admit I’m glazing over slightly now… Let’s hope the Third New Thing is something shiny…

5.54 There’s a cool new iPhone App – Keynote Remote – that allows you to control slides and read your notes. It costs 99c.

5.50 The second of three new things is: iWork 09. Keynote has new object and text transitions to wow the boardroom. Thrilling stuff.

5.46 Artist lessons are downloadable and cost $4.99 per track. For that you get the song to play along with, the lesson and notes about the track.

5.49 iLife 09 will ship at the end of january for $79

5.41 The new Garageband 09 has new guitar effects, new ways to jam and – most importantly – Learn to Play, with your own tutor. Garageband comes with 9 basic lessons for guitar and 9 from piano. You can download more – and there are even personal lessons from Sarah Maclachlan, Sting, John Fogerty and Norah Jones who will teach you to play some of their songs.

5.40 The animated maps (below) look pretty cool – expect to see lots of maps in my videos very soon…

5.37 The image stabilisation looks very impressive, getting rid of annoying camera shake. You can also put in slow-motion effects in real time, plus some other effects such as vignetting, sepia tones and cartoon effects.

5.35 The precision editor (picture below) gives precise control not only over video but also the audio tracks, which can be extended and edited independently of the video track.

5.33 – great news; you can extract audio from clips, which is one of the noticable losses between iMovie 06 and 08.

5.31 Randy Ubillos, the chief engineer of iMovie, is not on stage giving us a demo of the new features.

5.30 There’s a new version of iMovie in iLife 09 – which is good news for those of us who have been hitting some serious limitations. “Not every feature was there for every customer” says Phil of iMovie 08. So what’s new?

– there’s a new precision editor

– advanced drag and drop feature that show context-sensitive menus

– there are ‘themes’ that automatically creates transitions and titles

– you can also create 2D and 3D maps to show where you’ve travelled if you’re doing a travelogue

– automatic stabilisation

5.22 Phil’s now giving us a demonstration of these new features – the face recognition technology is pretty impressive, not lease because it allows Phil to say ‘let’s go inside Allie’s face to look at more photos’.

5.20 iPhoto 09 printing also allows you to put maps in your printed books.

5.18 iPhoto also features Slideshow Themes – with sophisticated animations and the ability to put a face-detected face at the centre of a picture. You can sync these slidehows with the iPhone, too.

5.15 Facebook and Flickr are integrated into iPhoto, too – allowing you to upload direct to Facebook. It’ll even upload the names of the people in the pictures, and sync any additional names back down from Facebook if there’s someone you don’t know in your pictures.

5.11 There’s also another way of navigating your photos, too – places. It uses GPS geotagging – so you’ll need a GPS-enabled camera such as the iPhone or new Nikon Coolpix. iPhoto will reconise the particular place from the Geotag – for example th Eiffel Tower, Paris, France – and you can use these to search through your pictures. If you don’t have GPS tags on your photos you can add a location by typing in an address – iPhoto will use Google Maps to find the exact place.

5.10 iPhoto 09 has a new way of navigating – using ‘Faces’. It uses face detection to find faces in the photos – you add a name and then it’ll recognise faces from other pictures.

5.09 First up iLife 09

5.08 It’s all going to be about Macs – last year Apple sold 9.7m macs, with double the growth of the rest of the industry.

5.03 The lights are dimming and Phil Schiller is on stage, coyly thanking us for turning up. He’s talking about the success of the Apple Stores – with 3.4million people going to the stores every week – that’s 100 times the numbers you get at Macworld, which is one of the reasons that this will be the last keynote.

4.59 There’s usually a real buzz around the Macworld keynotes, but this year there’s not much in the way of rumour – particularly now Steve Jobs has made an official announcement about his health. There has been some talk about Apple getting rid of DRM for all its music on iTunes, which seems like a no-brainer, plus iPhone software updates. But there’s also a feeling that there could be something bigger in the pipeline – not least because 2009 is the Mac’s 25th birthday.

4.50 After the usual unseemly rush, the media is now safely ensconced within the vast hall here at the Moscone Centre. Fee paying punters are making their way in, muttering about the disappointment that they paid up to $1000 a ticket and don’t even get to see Steve Jobs. But who knows, maybe he’ll make a cameo appearance…

4.15pm GMT – the keynote will begin in 45 minutes at 5pm GMY, not 6pm as I previously wrote!

Steve Jobs may be tucked up in bed with his cocoa, but I’m still here in San Francisco to cover Apple’s farewell Macworld keynote as it happens.

In Steve’s absence, the turtleneck will be passed to Apple’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller (pictured) who is expected to take to the stage at around 6pm 5pm UK time – and unveil Apple’s new toys.

Check back for full coverage from 5.45pm. 4.45pm

And in the meantime, you can check out our Macworld Rumour Roundup. I’m guessing… Snow Leopard update and a new Mac Mini/Apple TV. I’m hoping… iPhone nano.