It comes with apps for sending email, managing your schedule, making video calls, and backing up your Mac automatically. It even comes with an app for shopping for new apps. With OS X Lion, your Mac is more than full-featured, it’s fully loaded.

iPhoto

The best way to organize, edit, and share your photos.

iPhoto is an easy-to-use photo application that makes it fast and fun to organize and find your pictures, as well as make them look their absolute best. With features like Faces, Places, and Events, iPhoto helps you keep track of your photos by who’s in them and when and where you took them — all in an immersive full-screen view. Quick and simple editing tools let you make so-so shots picture perfect with just a few clicks. Photo Stream in iCloud automatically pushes new photos to all your devices, so you’re never without your latest shots. And if you feel like showing off what you’ve captured, iPhoto lets you share with beautiful photo books and letterpress cards or online via Facebook and Flickr. Learn more about iPhoto

See more of every shot as you view and edit your photos in full-screen mode.

Share your photos with Facebook friends or update your profile picture — right from iPhoto.

iMovie

Turn your home movies into home blockbusters.

Don’t settle for boring home movies. With iMovie, you can transform the videos you shoot into your very own indie flicks. Create a Hollywood-style trailer that’ll make your audience laugh, cry, and cheer for more. If you know how to drag and drop, you can make a movie in iMovie. It comes with Apple-designed themes that look fun and professional. Just choose one and iMovie does the rest, adding animated titles and sophisticated transitions automatically. Customize your screen gem further with your own words and audio. Learn more about iMovie

Make your very own Hollywood-style trailers with iMovie.

GarageBand

Creating great-sounding songs is as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4.

Whether you’re musically gifted or mostly curious, GarageBand is the application for you. Plug in your electric guitar or USB music keyboard and get ready to rock with virtual replicas of the most revered amps and stompboxes in the world, as well as over 100 software instruments. Just because you didn’t grow up learning your A, B, and C sharp doesn’t mean you can’t. Basic Lessons teach you just that: the basics. Choose from 40 lessons that cover blues guitar, rock guitar, classical piano, pop piano, and more. Or get a private lesson from one of your musical heroes, like Sting or Death Cab for Cutie, with Artist Lessons.¹ GarageBand even tells you how well you’re playing in real time with a feature called “How Did I Play?” Learn more about GarageBand

Groove Matching brings all your tracks together beautifully — even the ones that are out of rhythm.

Flex Time lets you quickly change the timing of your recording to fix mistakes or extend a riff.

Mac App Store

Get great apps for your Mac, from your Mac.

Just like shopping the App Store on iPad, the Mac App Store offers endless possibilities to browse and purchase apps. New apps install in one step right to Launchpad. And the Mac App Store lets you know when app updates are available, so you always have the latest versions. Learn more about the Mac App Store

Thousands of apps can be downloaded straight to Launchpad.

Updates appear automatically, and clicking Purchases lets you download apps to all of your Mac computers.

Safari

The world wide web. Now wider.

Designed with the Mac in mind, Safari emphasizes browsing, not the browser. In new full-screen view, the browser frame is only a pixel wide, and you can hide almost the entire interface if you choose. So there’s nothing to distract you from an article, video, or photo album. Navigating web pages is easy with new trackpad gestures; flip through web pages with a swipe, and double tap or pinch the trackpad to zoom in on text or images. Safari also features Reader, which lets you peruse articles sans annoying ads. Don’t have time to finish what you’ve started? Reading List lets you save links to articles and other web pages for later, and iCloud keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. Since pages render fast in Safari, you won’t miss a minute of the web. Learn more about Safari

Mail

An inbox full of great features.

Mail makes it easy to manage all your email from a single, ad-free inbox. It features powerful search capabilities, with search suggestions and tokens built in. It works with the free me.com email account you get when you sign up for iCloud, as well as most email standards — including POP3 and IMAP — and popular email services such as Gmail, Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL Mail. Mail supports Microsoft Exchange 2010, too. If you have more than one email account, no problem. Add your accounts to Mail and you’ll be able to access all your email from one place.

And Mail looks as great as it works. It makes full use of your display with a gorgeous widescreen view featuring a full-height message and a message list that includes snippets. With Conversations, messages from the same thread appear in an elegant timeline showing each communication as it was sent while hiding redundant text. Learn more about the new features of Mail

The favorites bar functions like a bookmarks bar in a web browser.

Click to switch to full-screen view.

iCal

A calendar that’s ahead of its time.

Keep track of your busy schedule and share it with others using iCal. Create separate calendars — one for home, another for school, a third for work, and so on. See all your calendars in a single window or choose to see only the calendars you want. iCal lets you create invitations using contact information from your Address Book, update your guest list, keep track of responses, and receive the latest status information. When you or another Mac user receives an iCal invitation via Mail, it’s automatically added. iCal also works with iCloud, Yahoo!, and Google. And when you use iCloud, every iCal edit you make on your Mac automatically appears on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. So no dinner dates are missed, no meeting goes unattended, and no anniversary is forgotten.

Access multiple calendars all from one application.

Select the calendar view you prefer from the middle of the top bar.

Address Book

Great with names. And faces.

With Address Book you have a flexible and convenient place to store contact information for everyone you know. You can import names, numbers, addresses, and photos from other applications; create smart groups for clubs, activities, and business purposes; print address labels and envelopes; and more. iCloud updates your contacts on your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac — so when you enter someone's contact info once, you have it everywhere. And since Address Book is built on vCard, an industry standard for storing contact information, your friends can send you cards that you can add simply by dropping them in — no typing required.

Add a photo for each contact with ease.

Organize your contacts with groups and smart groups.

Time Machine

Built-in backup.

Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard drive (sold separately) or Time Capsule. Connect the drive, assign it to Time Machine, and start enjoying some peace of mind. Time Machine automatically backs up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day — so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.

Find a previous version of any file quickly.

Browse by date to see how your system looked at any previous time.

Restore your entire Mac with the click of a button.

FaceTime

Make your smile go further.

FaceTime for Mac makes it possible to talk, smile, and laugh with anyone on an iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPod touch, or another Mac from your Mac.² So you can catch up, hang out, joke around, and stay in touch with just a click. And when someone tries to reach you, the call rings through on every Mac you own, even if FaceTime isn’t running. So you never have to worry about making yourself available. If you don’t want to receive calls, just turn FaceTime off in preferences. FaceTime is integrated with your Address Book so you can initiate chats easily.

Photo Booth

Say “cheese,” then smile.

Take photo snapshots and video clips with your Mac using Photo Booth. Send them to your friends, use one as an iChat icon, add them to your Address Book, or organize and edit them in iPhoto. The real fun starts when you use the effects and backdrops in Photo Booth. Snap a photo of yourself at the Eiffel Tower or in outer space. Choose from nine new effects that use facial tracking technology so effects look great whether you’re front and center — or left of center. Snap single photos or shoot multiples in a four-photo burst. You can even shoot video clips, complete with effects, then trim them right in Photo Booth and send them to friends and family. And since Photo Booth can be viewed full screen, you’ll enjoy every detail down to the last pixel.