Gene, here's a link and article regarding the iMac launch.
From Business & Tech.
austin360.com
Apple Computer Inc.'s iMac, the first personal computer with "box appeal," meets the public today in a debut that experts say could ignite one of the industry's most successful product rollouts.
Promoted since spring -- hyped, in the view of some observers -- as a glimpse of an Internet-driven future, small, one-piece iMac bears a heavy load for Apple. Its mission is to reverse Apple's decline among home users, a huge franchise Apple lost in the 1990s.
"This is critically important to (Apple)," James Staten of DataQuest said Friday."It's a really good product and I think there is a lot of pent-up demand for a consumer Mac."
Estimating the depth of that demand has been keeping Apple and its dealers up at night. The company angered customers and lost business in 1995 when it couldn't meet demand for some desktop computers.
Apple says it took 150,000 orders for the $1,299 iMac before sales began. One Apple insider said this week the number is closer to 350,000. Heading into the school year and then the holiday shopping season, traditionally important sales periods for Apple, there are even estimates that iMac sales could total 800,000-900,000 by year-end.
That would be a tremendous boost for Apple, fueling a 33 percent to 50 percent increase in market share, according to IDC, the industry research and consulting firm. Apple now ships about 625,000 computers a quarter, which gives it a 3 percent market share, said Roger Kay of IDC.
"It may be among the all-time best-selling models, when it's all through -- selling a few million machines," Kay said.
That would vindicate investors' optimism. Apple's shares have tripled since May, when Jobs provided the first glimpse of the iMac. Shares closed at $40.50, up $1.06 1/4, Friday in Nasdaq trading.
Apple will support the iMac with a $100 million ad campaign, including
television commercials that begin Sunday.
In Austin, CompUSA and Computize, which sell Apple products, are preparing for a surge of business today.
Sterling Steves, a Mac specialist at Computize, this week asked customers who had ordered several iMacs to take only part of their order so the store would have some to sell walk-in customers.
Computize, which focuses on corporate market for Macs, normally is closed Saturdays. But the iMac's introduction convinced the business to open today.
"We expect CompUSA to run out," Steves said.
Jim Halpin, chief executive of the 162-store CompUSA chain, said that would make history.
"If we sell all the inventory we have this weekend, it will be the best-selling computer we've ever seen," he said Friday.
The stakes are dauntingly high for Apple, the company that many people agree started the consumer computer industry when it introduced the first Mac in 1982.
Apple is emerging from a disastrous, three-year slide in which it lost $1.86 billion and gave up huge chunks of market share to computers that run Microsoft Corp. software and Intel Corp. microprocessors.
The iMac comes with a 233-megahertz PowerPC chip, which tests by BYTE
magazine showed is considerably faster than similarly rated Pentium chips from Intel.
Known more for his marketing savvy than technical skills, Steve Jobs, Apple's interim chief executive, suggested the design project that produced iMac, according to Apple employees. At one of the team's early meetings, the idea was floated that Apple should have a computer that would be used by the "Jetsons,"the futuristic cartoon family.
With its high-performance as a foundation, the radically new look of the box is expected to bring many customers to the Mac platform.
"People have been coming around and saying, 'Wow'," noted Kay, the IDC researcher who was trying out an iMac Friday in his Framingham, Mass., office.
"They don't do that when you get a Wintel box, and I've had a lot of hot boxes in here."
Rich |
