Apple has taken the airwaves hostage and is subverting radio's noble purpose by turning it into nothing more than a vehicle for iMac propaganda. And it's about bloody well time, eh? For years it's been nothing but Pentium ads. We heartily welcome the change of pace, even if it's only temporary.

Unfortunately, as far as radio is concerned, half of the AtAT staff listens almost exclusively to the punk shows on the local college station, and the other half prefers the soothing camp of the "greatest hits of the seventies and eighties," and neither station is broadcasting the Apple ads. Apparently we're the wrong demographic for iMac advertising. (Can't say as that's a real shock-- but we're buying one anyway, so Apple doesn't need to advertise to us.) Luckily, Apple realized that its ads couldn't reach everyone who wanted to hear them, so they were kind enough to post them on their website, in QuickTime format. Since they're only a few hundred kilobytes apiece, we definitely recommend that you take a listen. The whole "countdown to iMac" thing works pretty well.

Of course, Apple isn't the only one pushing the iMac on the radio. CompUSA recently had a reasonably decent iMac ad of the "PC Modem guy" type. But even better, in our opinion, is the radio ad by ComputerWare, a retail chain in California, brought to our attention by a faithful viewer known only as The Saint. Their ad has a goofiness all its own, and it, too, is only a couple of hundred kilobytes to download, so do your ears a favor. And do everything your radio advises.

But radio is just the start, according to far-flung sources from Nome to Norway, and confirmed by an Apple press release. Apple has indeed allocated over $100 million to spend on advertising the iMac. We're pretty sure we've heard that Apple's been spending about $150 million a year total on advertising, so the iMac advertising budget isn't just huge-- it's the single biggest ad campaign in Apple's history. Which is only fitting, as it's pushing the single biggest product release (we hope) that Apple's ever had.

There are no big surprises in the press release regarding Apple's ad plans; in addition to the radio spots, billboards and magazine ads will show the iMac in all its Aquafresh-colored glory. The 12-page magazine insert that we've heard so much about will apparently be quite widespread-- over 15 million copies will be distributed in major magazines this quarter, which is more than twice as many as Apple has used in the past. (If that includes the PowerBook G3 pullout, then we're talking about a lot of iMac inserts, because we've got a stack of those PowerBook ones thick enough to stun a llama. Not that we condone the maltreatment of llamas in any way, shape, or form.)

The iMac television commercials will debut this Sunday, during-- surprise, surprise-- the Wonderful World of Disney on ABC. (Nothing like having an interim CEO with Pixar ties to Disney, hmmm?) No touchy-feely "Think Different"-style ads here; Apple claims that the focus of the ads is on the iMac's speed (and Apple's really pushing that point hard, as you can see in another press release about iMac performance), easy Internet access, and overall simplicity, compared to the relatively complicated world of PCs. We can't wait to see what Apple and TBWA Chiat/Day have come up with. And whatever it is, kudos to Apple for deciding to run it during South Park, "family values" be damned. Sweeeet.

Hey, remember last week when Robert Cringely claimed to have inside information on the iMac's production run that was less than complimentary? He had said that as of the week before, Apple had only managed to crank out 5,000 iMacs. And worse yet, in a random sampling taken from the production run, Cringely said that Apple had found an 11% out-of-box failure rate. With numbers like that, the chances of a successful iMac launch looked pretty dismal.

Yet we were buoyed by the fact that no one else seemed to be reporting the numbers that Cringely had. It's not easy to suppress information like a staggering 11% failure rate, so why was Cringely the only person talking about it? Well, according to Apple Recon, there's a simple answer: it's not true. They describe Cringely's "5000 iMacs" figure as "way off," according to their own sources. And the 11% failure rate is apparently old news, back from Apple's first pre-production demo run, which makes sense-- remember the reports that 83 iMacs were shipped from Laguna West to New York for the MacWorld Expo? Sounds like they actually tried building an initial run of 100 units, and 11 of them failed. Of the remaining 89, Apple culled five or six from the batch for local demos and sent the rest to the Expo. Plausible, no?

When we have to make a judgement call on whose information is right, Cringely's or Recon's, we've gotta go with Recon. They may be arrogant, they may be cryptic, they may spend a good 70% of their time telling everyone how right they were when they made an off-the-cuff prediction back in '96, but pound for pound, they often come up with the goods. So we thank Apple Recon for easing some of the concerns raised in our minds regarding Apple's ability to build iMacs fast enough to get to the stores-- and well enough that they work when you pull them out of the box.