Photo: Apple Inc.

Apple's (AAPL) surprise announcement Tuesday of four new or updated product lines — iMac, MacBook, Mac mini and a touch-sensitive "Magic Mouse" — does at least three things:

1. Builds on the momentum created by the blowout earnings announced Monday
2. Gives customers a reason to reconsider Apple's desktop machines
3. Keeps the press from writing about Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows 7 — set for release Thursday — for at least another day.

The second point was underscored in a note to clients issued Tuesday afternoon by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster. He points out that Apple achieved an 17% increase in computer sales last quarter despite fighting the "headwind" of desktop machines that had grown increasing long in the tooth. Desktop unit sales were down 16% year over year last quarter, compared with an astonishing 35% increase in MacBook sales.

The new machines — especially the thinner, faster iMacs — could change that.

"In other words," writes Munster, "the headwind that existed in the Sept. quarter due to aging Mac desktops has now turned into a tailwind for Mac units in the Dec. quarter."

The best place to learn about the new machines is probably Apple's own website. We're particularly fond of the little video industrial designer Jonathan Ive recorded about the new iMacs, pasted below the fold.

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The rumors of a flurry of new machines were true

Photo: Apple Inc.

UPDATE: Apple's online store came back online shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern with new iMacs, a new MacBook, a new Mac mini and a new "Magic" Mouse (the Mighty Mouse having run into trademark problems). The products are displayed on the reconfigured website and described in a series of press releases:

• The new iMacs
• The new MacBook
• The new Magic Mouse

Apple's website describes a new "mightier" mini, but no press release on that yet.

- – - -

Apple's (AAPL) online store went off line Tuesday morning, adding fuel to rumors that it held its quarterly earnings call a day early to clear the decks for the release of some new hardware.

The Apple blogs have been predicting this for weeks, none more succinctly than Daring Fireball's John Gruber, who responded to a provocation from Dan "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons with this cryptic note:

Dan Lyons Apparently Thinks Yours Truly Hasn’t Heard About the Redesigned Plastic MacBooks, Redesigned (‘Impressive’) iMacs, Updated Minis (Including One That Ships With Mac OS X Server), the Multi-Touch Magic Mouse, and, as the Wildcard I’m-Not-Sure-I-Re

Unseemly for the Fake Steve character to be so wrong (or, frankly, even to care) about what I know.

By Thursday, I'm sure everybody will be talking about Windows 7 again.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Like nature, the Apple rumor mill abhors a vacuum, and for much of this month it has been filled with talk of "the Brick."

What is the Brick? The question was first posed the day after Steve Jobs' "Let's Rock" keynote address by Cleve Nettles on the Apple blog 9 to 5 Mac. He wrote that a tipster with "a solid track record" told him that the mid-October introduction of a new line of MacBooks (see here) is "all about the Brick."

"What does 'The Brick' mean?" Nettles asked his readers. "Can anyone out there help us out?" (link)

Readers were happy to oblige. Hundreds of messages, dozens of blog postings, and at least two reader polls later, no definitive answers have emerged. Speculation reached a fever pitch this weekend after The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reported that Apple had e-mailed resellers with instructions to remove and destroy all Apple TV displays and literature by 5 p.m. Sept. 30, when a webcast "kick off" was supposedly scheduled. Could the Brick be the long-awaited arrival of Apple TV, Take 3?

The Sept. 30 deadline, it turns out, is the anniversary of the debut of those Apple TV store displays, which suggests that the company may simply be destroying some outdated print material containing screen shots whose permissions have run out. (link)

But that hasn't slowed the flood of ideas about what Steve Jobs might have up his sleeve next. As is often the case with Apple watchers, the speculation says more about their needs and fantasies than Apple's (AAPL) product plans.

So what's on their wish list? A sampling of what some have suggested the Brick might be:

• An Apple TV with a built-in Blu-Ray disk, TV receiver, digital TV recorder and its own App store (link)
• A new Apple-branded gaming system (link)
• A Time Capsule with "smarts" that functions as an iTunes server (link)
• A redesigned and much more powerful Mac Mini (link)
• The announcement that Apple has aquired TiVo (TIVO) and is discontinuing the Apple TV (link)
• A tablet-sized Mac with a touch-screen keyboard (link)
• A low-cost MacBook to compete in the sub-notebook market (link)
• A wireless USB hub that that links keyboards, mice, DVD drives, networking, hard drives, new displays (link)
• Nothing brick-shaped, but rather a product or group of products sexy enough to "smash" Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows once and for all (link)

My favorite reader comment, posted by "cardiomac" on TUAW in response to a suggestion that the Apple TV was "not meant to be a computer," borrows from the "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock":

No! I am not a computer, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool. (link)