Ok, I'm back from the Apple Special Event preview at PhotoPlus, and I'm having to eat my words. I said they'd have pro software for us, but that a photo expo would be a silly place to debut hardware. I was wrong, in part because the new Aperature editing software needs the new hardware. Video editors will love the new computers, too, though.

First up: New Power Books, for editing and portfolio management on the go. All three powerbooks com standard with SuperDrive now, for mobile DVD burning, and they saw price cuts. The 15" and 17" got huge display boosts, too, now sporting 1440 x 960 and a whopping 1680 x 1050 (the same rsolution as the 20" Cinema Display) repectively. At 40% brighter, they should be daylight readable under most conditions, and as an added bonus they an extra hour of battery life.

Next up: new Dual Core PowerMac G5s. The G5 line was upgraded to use dual-core PPC processors, now comes in three varieties: a dual core 2Ghz, a dual core 2.3Ghz, and the "PowerMac G5 Quad": a quad-core system with 2 x 2.5Ghz dual core PPC processors rated at a stunning 76.6 gigaflops. All three support up to 16GB 533Mhz DDR2 RAM and up to 1TB SATA on-disk storage. The graphics bus is now PCI Express with support for a custom built NVIDEA 4500 FX card that will support two of the new 30" HD Cinema Displays. The bus has four slots and you can fill them all with cards, giving you support for 4 of the new 30" displays, although there's no word on whether you can fill all 4 slots with 4500 FX cards and get support for 8…at least without melting the aluminum case. (Update: you can't the 4500 Fx is a double-wide card, and nothing else will handle 2 x 30" at the moment. You can, though, make an 8 x 23" array if you want, and can afford to).

And finally, Aperture, Apple's new pro digital editing application. This is a really slick looking piece of software, and I'm dying to test drive it later in the week. On the surface it combines the best features of Photoshop Elements and ACDSee into one powerful professional package. It has standard editing tools (curves, channels, crop, resize, etc.), a fast photo library, and new features for organizing workflows. "Stacks" automatically arranges pictures based on a shutter lag time you pick so that it will automatically group shots from a single session—or even single burst—so that you can compare them. "Light Table" is a virtual light table that lets you drag and drop pictures to create layouts or just juxtapose shots, and "Loupe" is, well, a loupe that lets you magnify a section of picture up to 800% as you drag the circular windoe around.  Prhaps most importantly, Apple set out to make non-destructive editing of RAW files as easy as working with JPEGs, and it looks like they succeeded. Aperture seems to handle the big files quickly and with ease (at least on a G5 Quad) and includes features for drag and drop batch editing to, say, apply white balance correction to an entire "stack" of pictures taken in the same light. and of course, built-in web and print design with integrated Color Sync profiling.

There was no mention about filters and other effects beyond basic adjustment, so this isn't a CS2 competitor yet, but it will certainly take a lot of the grunt work off of Photoshop if people adpot it. And of course, that's the question: will people with an existing investment in Photoshop and Extensis want to switch? It's hard to say. But at only $499, Aperature is going to be intrigueing, at the very least.