As you're all well aware, Macworld Expo keynotes are rife with long-standing tradition. Certain aspects of Steve Jobs's dog-and-pony show are so predictable, people freak out when he breaks from routine; plenty of Apple-watchers are still trying to scrape their jaws off the floor after the man ditched the whole black turtleneck thing and appeared on stage last week in a suit and tie. And that wasn't the only departure from the status quo that had Apple fans reeling in the aisles; where was Steve's patented "one more thing..." announcement? Black is white, up is down, cats and dogs are living together!

Still, at least one time-honored tradition managed to survive in Steve's latest fireside chat: whenever the man introduces new hardware, it's become customary for him to give the audience the first public glimpse of Apple's new TV commercials, and last week was no exception. The assembled faithful in the Makuhari Messe Event Hall got to evaluate five, count 'em, five new iMac ads on the big screen-- whereas the rest of us had to settle for the video-on-demand webcast version that was finally posted a couple of days later. Needless to say, the chintzy sound and smeary, teensy image size of the archived webcast didn't exactly make for ideal conditions for the appreciation of Apple's latest marketing push-- plus we, uh, can't read Japanese. Obviously the new ads center around the trippy iTunes visuals and how well they match the controversial new "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian" iMacs, but we didn't feel we could form an opinion on them one way or the other until we saw them more clearly.

Thankfully, as faithful viewer David Triska noted a couple of days ago, Apple has now posted high-quality QuickTime versions of all five ads to its site, so now you can experience them as they were meant to be seen and heard. (Well, almost-- we haven't yet seen any of these commercials on broadcast TV, which will be the real test.) Each one drenches the viewer in a particular type of music as the screen is filled with iTunes's psychedelic visuals, some simple words appear to point out that iMacs can burn audio CDs, play MP3s, etc.; the camera pulls out to show the visuals dancing around on a Flower Power or Blue Dalmatian iMac, which does a happy little catwalk spin to show off its spiffy new threads, and then it's back to the visuals close-up, the Apple logo, and then blackness. Load up all five and bathe yourself in Apple's minimalist thirty-second message: when it comes to digital music, iMacs rock.

Those of you who feel that the practice of using Jeff Goldblum to narrate Apple's commercials is one tradition that should be relegated to the dustbin of history, well, you'll be happy to hear that Apple's new iMac ads are voiceover-free-- there's no extraneous sound to mess with the integrity of the music. And if you're in the "Flower Power Must Die" camp after having seen only the pictures posted to Apple's site, you really owe it to yourself to check out how the new patterns look in the commercials; neither "Flower Power" nor "Blue Dalmatian" is as garish as the web images imply. Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison. We admit it-- judging by the commercial footage, the real new patterns aren't half bad. That doesn't mean we'll be sticking a Flower Power iMac in the den anytime soon, but we're not spending all our time wondering just when Steve lost his mind, either. Hey, the man approved the use of "The Radio Still Sucks" by The Ataris, so we're willing to give his sanity the benefit of the doubt for now.

Speaking of the controversial new iMac patterns, we've got our first clue that they might prove more popular than many of us originally anticipated. Whether or not they'll sell is, of course, our biggest concern; there's no reason to take the introduction of "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian" as a personal affront, since there's always Indigo and Graphite for people with more conservative tastes. But those of us with a vested interest in seeing Apple succeed and grow (and that includes each and every one of you who uses a Mac, not just those of us who also happen to be shareholders) don't want to see Steve's latest vision clogging warehouses with unsold and rapidly-depreciating stock in the quarter that Apple is supposed to return to profitability.

Anyway, we found this interesting: faithful viewer Derek Dohler was bold enough to have gone right ahead and ordered a Blue Dalmatian iMac last week, and at the time the Apple Store quoted him an estimated ship date of "3 days." However, a few days later, he got email from Apple-- which, as frequent Apple Store customers know, is rarely good news. Here's what it said: "We appreciate your recent order for our new, exciting iMac... this email is to inform you we have incurred a slight delay and that we now expect your iMac to be shipped by March 3rd." That's hardly enough of a delay to complain about (especially in the context of PowerBook G4 orders that are still backed up since early January), but the reason given might be a positive sign: "This delay is the result of high demand for the product."

High demand, eh? So are Blue Dalmatian iMacs really so popular that Apple can't build them fast enough to keep up with the screaming hordes who are clamoring for their "dotted i's"? Don't answer yet, because as faithful viewer Tim Kirk wrote in to tell us, MacCentral is reporting that the Apple Store has since shifted its shipping estimate for both patterned iMacs from three days to seven. What's more, one MacCentral reader received email similar to Derek's, but his ship date had been moved to March 6th-- and his order was for a Flower Power model.

So there are a couple of possible interpretations of this news. One is that both Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian are selling like crazy and Apple is having trouble filling orders as quickly as people can place them. Another is that Apple always blames delays on "high demand" and is just having trouble making any of the patterned iMacs due to some parts shortage or manufacturing difficulty-- building those patterns right into the iMac's polycarbonate shell might indeed be posing a bit of a challenge. But we'd prefer to think that fashion-forward consumers from Atlanta to Zurich are snapping up floral-print and polka-dotted iMacs at a rate far in excess of Apple's wildest and most optimistic projections. It's gonna be a Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian world, baby, just you wait!

Still more evidence that we at AtAT are hopelessly out of touch with the rest of the world: we really didn't expect any serious opposition to Apple's choice to replace the DVD-ROM drive in the higher-end iMacs with a CD-RW drive instead. The way we saw it, there were only two uses for the DVD-ROM drive: playing DVD movies and accessing DVD-ROM-based software titles, and neither seems all that compelling. We assume that the vast majority of people with DVD movies already own consumer DVD players hooked up to actual TVs, and would rather watch them there than on a 15-inch computer screen. And DVD-ROM software distribution really hasn't caught on the way that Apple expected-- sure, there are a few reference titles and clip-art collections that come on DVD-ROM, but for the average consumer, we figured the ability to back up data and make music CDs without additional third-party hardware was much more important than being able to watch A Bug's Life in the den instead of in the living room.

Apparently, though, a sampling of the Japanese Mac-using population doesn't agree with us; a ZDNet article indicates that at least some Expo-goers were a mite upset with Apple for waving the DVD-ROM carrot-on-a-stick and then yanking it away again; "most attendees polled by ZDNet News said DVD is still more useful to them." One such gentleman predicted that "the general public will not accept this machine." Of course, his argument sort of breaks down at that point, since he goes on to talk about watching DVDs on the train on his PowerBook, and we doubt many people were planning to lug an iMac on the subway with a really long extension cord just to watch Pulp Fiction on the way to work. Still, that's the general sort of attitude we're picking up on; people want their DVD-ROM drives. The main concern seems to be that since external third-party CD-RW drives are cheap and plentiful, but DVD-ROM drives are not, Apple should be shipping the rarer option as a built-in component.

Here's what we would have preferred: high-end iMacs shipping standard with CD-RW, just like now, but with a no-cost DVD-ROM drive swapout build-to-order option at the Apple Store for customers who already own external CD burners. If Apple can do this for the Power Mac G4 (and it has), surely it wouldn't be too tough to rig it for the iMac, too. Even better, of couse, would have been DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drives for the best of both worlds, but we're betting that Apple ditched that plan because slot-loading combo drives aren't available yet. One thing's clear, though-- while we think Apple made the right choice in the iMac, we hope that the PowerBook and iBook stick with DVD-ROM in some fashion. While watching movies on a 15-inch screen at home isn't the most thrilling thing in the world, watching them on an LCD at 30,000 feet is decidedly très cool.