The news wires are humming with still further evidence of the iMac's mass appeal. Most likely you've seen by now that Creative Computers, the company that runs the MacZone MacWarehouse MacMall mail-order house, has announced that it's received $4 million in iMac orders, and the product's only been available for a week and a half. That's the largest dollar volume Creative has seen for any computer during launch time-- and since Creative also runs PC Mall, that includes Wintel systems as well. A Business Wire release has more details.

"Consumer interest in the iMac is bigger than big," according to Dan DeVries, Creative's executive veep of sales and marketing. He claims that both he and the CEO went ahead and bought iMacs for their families because they were so excited about the product. But the really cool thing is that Creative has gotten so many inquiries about the iMac from their PC-using customers, they've decided to start advertising the irresistible blue lump in its PC Mall catalog as well. A Mac being advertised in a PC catalog? Pinch us, we're dreaming... It's like the start of a sort of karmic realignment to make up for all those Windows ads we've had to wade through in MacWorld and MacWEEK. Here's hoping the trend continues, which may be a key factor in the expansion of the Mac's market share.

Personally, we at AtAT have always found the ClubMacZoneMallWarehouseConnection mail-order houses to be somewhat interchangeable, and we frequently get them mixed up (except we know that MacWarehouse is the one with the really outrageous memory prices and that lady with the headset on the catalog that hasn't changed a pixel in over ten years). But from now on, we're more likely to remember MacMall as "the one who started advertising the iMac in its PCMall catalog." That means that this strategy isn't just good for Apple and the Mac market-- it ought to be good for MacMall, too, who will see increased iMac sales from their PC-using customers, and possibly a surge of support from Mac users who appreciate the company's attempt to expand the market, no matter how self-serving the motive. After all, in a general sense, we Mac users are a fiercely loyal bunch. (Hey, we're just happy we may soon have a reason to at least open the PC Mall catalogs we get in the mail before we toss them into the recycling bin.)

For crying out Pete's sake, we continue to be stunned and amazed by the death grip that most people seem to have on their floppy disks. Based purely on the reactions we've witnessed from potential buyers getting iMac demos in the stores, we'd have to guess that if Apple had included a floppy drive in the system and kept the price at the $1299 mark, all of the additional sales would have made back the extra expense. The lack of a floppy drive seems to be the number one deterrent causing interested parties to decide against getting an iMac.

Yes, we fully understand that some people really do need floppy drives. Students, for example, might not have school net access to email their projects to their iMacs at home and back again (and do you really want to have to rely on your ISP when you're under deadline?). Limitations like that are why even ingenious solutions like the upcoming www.iMacFloppy.com, a cool free "virtual floppy" that grants 4MB of storage space on a secure internet server, aren't going to fill the need for everyone. But if we had to hazard a guess (and faithful viewers are well aware that we aren't averse to such things), we'd have to say that a good solid two-thirds of the people complaining that the iMac has no floppy drive don't really need one in the first place, but haven't really considered that the Internet is a suitable substitute in many (though not all) scenarios. Besides, $90 USB floppy drives will be shipping any day, now, for that segment of the population who really needs them.

And of course there are also the true psychotics out there who not only discovered that the iMac's motherboard has the circuitry necessary to support a standard Apple SuperDrive floppy, but actually grabbed a soldering iron, voided the hell out of their warranties by affixing the necessary socket, and now have a functioning floppy drive sitting ugly and bare-ass naked on the desk next to their gleaming iMacs, connected by an umbilical length of ribbon cable. Yes, we're suitably impressed at the technical prowess and the sheer guts involved to do such a thing, but does anyone really need a floppy drive that badly? Don't get us wrong-- it's unquestionably a neat hack, and we can understand the "we did it because we could" mentality, but if anyone out there is seriously performing this iMac surgery because they absolutely positively could not wait another second to add a floppy drive to their systems, we'd like to remind them that there's a big, bright world out there (so we're told) to enjoy until Imation and Newer Technology ship their USB floppies. Breathe deeply; it won't be long now.

If Mac OS Rumors is correct about Apple's next peripheral expansion strategy, the lack of floppy drives in future Macs won't be an issue to anybody. If you've ever marvelled at the hot-swappable "media bays" in the current PowerBook G3 Series laptops, you'll be interested to hear that Apple reportedly plans on standardizing on that architecture across its product line. The PowerBook G3's media bays currently accept modular floppy drives, CD-ROM units, and DVD-ROM devices (as well as the laptop's batteries), and could also accept special Zip drives, hard disks, etc.

Apparently Apple is considering adding these media bays to just about every Mac coming down the pike, beginning with the next model in the iMac line. If that's true, then the term "hot-swappable" takes on a whole new meaning; you could, for example, pop your PowerBook's floppy module into your "iMac+," or put together a multimedia presentation for a client on a media-bay hard drive docked in your desktop system, then pop it into your PowerBook for the on-site pitch. Swapping peripherals across systems would become effortless, and economical. After all, why pay for more than one floppy drive if you've got three computers?

Of course, as faithful viewer Todd Wheeler points out, the only potential problem would be some seriously clashing color schemes, but we've got to say, we like the idea of temporarily popping a Bondi-blue DVD-ROM drive into, say, a translucent grey PowerBook. And as long as Apple sticks to variations on the "everything translucent" theme, mismatched components will probably look pretty darn cool. Heck, we'd mix things up on purpose.