It took me several different articles about Apple's recent product announcements to realize what the big deal about iLife actually is. I shrugged at the silly name, "iLife." I snickered at the slogan, "It's like Microsoft Office for the rest of your life"— though not before shaking off a double-take at the unintended second meaning of the phrase. After reading some brief descriptions, I wondered if the admittedly enviable upgrades of the products that were already bundled with my new Mac would be worth $49, and thought maybe not.

What I didn't realize until the next day: iLife includes GarageBand, a fully featured music authoring system, with reasonably rich MIDI and audio recording, editing and mixing capabilities. It has most of the features I paid hundreds for in the still-Panther-buggy Cubase professional-grade music production suite. If it's anything like the rest of the iLife suite, it'd be worth at least twice $49 on its own. Add the iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes upgrades, and iLife is just an insanely great deal.

GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD all cater to a notion of personal art that I've been desperate to formalize over the past few years, if only to emphasize its importance. I'd be writing more about it here if it didn't so closely resemble blogging about blogging...