Steve Jobs enjoy making surprises, it seems to be good for business. Apple Expo sure lacked product announcements and the show was dedicated to the iPod nano and iTunes 5. But few weeks later, Apple announced an invitation-only special event in California for the 12th of October. Every VIP concerned received a card stamped with “One more thing…”.

Last week during the show, Apple unveiled new products, blowing the competition with a new iMac, a new iPod and a new user media experience. Apple now upgrades often and that’s impressive to see how many products they’ve put on the market this year. Anyway, the iPod upgrade was not actually the big surprise, it was so expected. So yes, it’s true, iPod goes video and you can buy clips right from the iTunes Music Store. As usual, the thing is pretty well manufactured, gets a bigger screen and a bigger hard-drive. The introduction of a black model makes the iPod line even more coherent and attractive. That’s great.

But what makes me more excited is actually the iMac upgrade. It was not much anticipated, so in my opinion it was the true surprise of the show. With this upgrade, Apple has gone one step further into the integration of software and hardware for a better user experience. The new iMac comes with a thinner case, a more powerful core up to 2.1Ghz and a great video card. But it also comes with an built-in iSight camera and a media center software. You got video conferencing out-of-the-box without buying anything more. That will make video conferencing a seamless experience for everybody. I guess its a premiere of turning the computer into a real communication device. As a bonus, they’ve released a funny app — PhotoBooth — to take picture of you in front of the computer and applying all kind of filters on your face — Steve Jobs made an hilarious demonstration on the show.

Concerning the media center software, Apple made it available out-of-the-box. They’ve integrated into the new iMac a software called FrontRow. With FrontRow you can control your iMac using a remote control to listen music, watch video and DVDs, and look at photos. When activated, FrontRow will goes fullscreen and will smoothly turn your Mac into a big iPod for browsing your media. As usual, the user interface is well polished, very simple to use and most important it use big and clear menus when you’re far from your Mac.

If using your Mac for watching media is great that would be better on your big TV. And that’s were the Mac mini comes in. When Apple released their mini month ago, I though it was the perfect candidate for a media center device, the only thing missing was a fullscreen browsing software. But given the nature of MacOS X, it was so easy to make and I was pretty sure that Apple had something ready to fill the gap. FrontRow is not yet available for other Macs but I bet that’s a question of time, even if Apple needs to sell computers there is no interest to limit the usage of FrontRow to the new iMac. The remote control is already sold separately from the Mac so we’re pretty close.

Finally about pricing, the new iMac is not that expensive given the hardware, integrated software and design you’ll get. So for 1379€ the 17-inch model, you’ll have a fantastic desktop computer, a pretty good deal.