Apple lifts lid on iWork software

Rumours of high-profile Apple debuts have been circulating for months, prompting the secretive company to sue the alleged source of several information leaks.

Many of the reports turned out to be true, with Jobs beginning the cavalcade of product announcements with the unveiling of iWork, a new software package that will take on Microsoft's Office in the Mac software market.

The package will include Pages, a new word processing program developed by Apple, and an updated version of Keynote, a slideshow application Apple introduced two years ago.

Like other Apple products, Jobs said one of the major advantages of iWork will be its integration with the Mac OS X operating system. "iWork is a product we've created from the ground up to take advantage of OSX," he said.

The release of iWork marks another chapter in Apple's on-and-off partnership with Microsoft, whose Mac version of Office has long been the standard productivity package for operating system, partly out of necessity. Apple's own AppleWorks package has achieved only modest market share, mostly in educational settings, and the company's FileMaker database software has never posed a significant threat to Microsoft's similar Access.

Jobs also unveiled a new budget PC called the Mac Mini -- a tiny cube with a processor, hard drive and optical drive, and a new flash-based display-less iPod.