With Lion Apple Takes a Mac-kward Approach

Today Steve Jobs did his usual Willy Wonka impression and walked us through the latest innovations to emerge from the fruit factory. There are subtle but major updates to iLife with updates to iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband that really are focussed less on features and more on encouraging people to use the products more.

With iPhoto there’s better sharing features with facebook and it’s even easier to make a book for your grandparents. With iMovie you can create a truly professional looking trailer and sound effects. Garageband adds Autotune-esque timing abilities to your jam sessions as well as new and improved lessons.

The iLife model is genius in itself. Add features that delight customers on an annual basis, charge a reasonable price ($49). Done. Why wouldn’t you upgrade?

But the meat of the presentation was reserved for what we think is a major, major, paradigm shift.

The Lion just roared.

Apple is doing something that to many of it’s competitors would be almost unfathomable. They’re bringing a mobile interface to the deskop.

The original iPhone user interface was originally designed not on a phone, but an early iPad prototype. It was refined on the phone and then unveilled to the world on the iPad.

Today, Apple came full circle and brought the mobile interface paradigm we now know and love from our iOS devices to the desktop. There’s an AppStore, there’s apps with persistant states, there’s gestures.

Essentially Apple is taking a huge bet that people will want to interact with their desktops and laptops in the same way they interact with their mobile devices and that bet could end up being the biggest change in the desktop computer user interface this decade.

Read more about the details over at Engadget