Apple touts its iLife suite of photo, video, music, and Web applications as one of the best reasons to buy a new machine, but for existing Mac owners, new iLife releases traditionally cost $79. With iLife '09, however, Apple has given owners of PowerPC Macs a major incentive not to upgrade: the most significant new feature in GarageBand '09 is Intel-only.

Despite all of Apple's foot stomping about Universal Binaries and convincing developers how easy it is to straddle both sides of the Mac CPU fence, the company felt the need to take the much-buzzed new "Artist Lessons" feature of GarageBand '09 to the side with greener grass. From iLife '09's system requirements section at the Apple Store online: "GarageBand Learn to Play requires an Intel-based Mac with a dual-core processor or better."

Learn to Play is easily GarageBand 09's most appealing new feature, as major recording artists like Sting and Fall Out Boy sit adoring users down to teach them how to play their hit songs. Building on Apple's ridiculously-successful App Store business model of bite-sized purchases, more lessons can be purchased for $4.99 apiece from a Lesson Store built into GarageBand.

Apple's site and the iLife '09 software box both state this requirement in fine print, though this increase in system requirements appears to be the latest in a new trend for Apple. The dramatically rewritten iMovie '08 was the first iLife app to eliminate the G4 PowerPC from its supported CPUs, raising its demands to an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 dual 2.0 GHz, or an iMac G5 1.9 GHz.

In a way this isn't surprising; Apple has been using iLife to push the boundaries of both flashy-yet-useful UI design and the capabilities of media editing software. Still, PowerPC owners hoping to get in on the iLife '09 fun are probably feeling the Intel squeeze on their wallets more than ever now. We can only expect these performance requirements to become more stringent in future iLife releases.