Well, so much for all those stories about the iMac's flagging popularity. You know the ones-- they all said that since demand in September wasn't as high as demand in August, the iMac was on the way out. That rather simplistic conclusion ignores the legions of Mac fans who had been waiting to buy an iMac since it was announced three months before its eventual release; of course sales would spike highest in August, as pent-up demand was fulfilled. But anyway, the media was full of stories about how the iMac was a flash in the pan. However, the latest sales data from CompUSA would seem to indicate that the iMac will be flashing for a while longer. A CNET story has some encouraging news.

One of the biggest obstacles to the iMac becoming a monumental market share builder is its $1299 price tag. Yes, it's a very good price for all you get, but consumers think in megahertz. Time and time again we are told by curious Wintel users that they're intrigued by the iMac, but they can't see paying $1299 for a 233 MHz computer. (Once we show them specs and benchmarks that indicate the G3 is much faster than the Pentium II at equivalent clock speeds, they warm up to the idea.) Now that there are $599 computers out there, the iMac's sticker price (which struck us as pretty shockingly low when it was announced in May) is looking higher and higher. We'd love to see Apple drop the iMac's price, if such a move were economically viable, but we doubt it'll happen before next year. So in order to pull in more iMac customers, CompUSA ran its own promotion that effectively lowered the overall price of the iMac: they "gave away" printers and scanners.

And lo, the consumers rejoiced: according to a CompUSA press release, because of the free printers and scanners promotion, iMacs "continue to gain momentum." Between the free peripherals and Apple's new $29.99-a-month payment program (which wasn't even advertised until this week), the weekend's sales were the highest since the iMac first debuted on August 15th, making the little blue powerhouse "the best selling personal computer in CompUSA's history." Nice job! Now can CompUSA sustain this level of interest? The holidays are approaching fast...

It's hard for us to think of QuickTime 3 as being anything but "new" (in part because we only very recently got the QuickTime Pro upgrade with Mac OS 8.5, which stopped that irritating advertisement movie), but we'd better get used to the idea pretty quickly. QuickTime 4 is just around the corner, and if the rumors are correct, it'll contain some important features that a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting for a long, long time now. A CNET article talks about the rumored next release.

The latest guesses as to QuickTime 4's release date place the unveiling at the Macworld Expo this January-- less than two months away. The biggest new feature will reportedly be the overdue addition of a true streaming technology, which Steve Jobs demonstrated onstage at the WWDC last May; the addition of true streaming capability will make QuickTime on par with RealVideo and Microsoft's NetShow for live netcasts, but it gets even better: since this streaming will just be another function built into QuickTime, any application that can show QuickTime media-- and there are a lot of them-- will be able to show a live video feed. That could be the edge that makes QuickTime 4 the streaming technology of choice.

Some rumors state that Steve Jobs will unveil QuickTime 4 and its new capabilities by broadcasting his keynote speech live over the Internet. Of course, that rumor has surfaced before-- when it was announced that Jobs would be broadcasting his keynote from California for last July's New York Expo, the whispers around the water cooler were that he would make the speech via real-time QuickTime streaming. But Jobs showed up in person, instead, so we're not holding our breath. It'd be pretty dramatic, though.

Okay, it's official: AtAT backs Intel exec Steven McGeady one hundred percent in the current "Redmond Justice" skirmish. McGeady's testimony, you probably recall, directly contradicts several statements made by Microsoft überguy Bill Gates during his videotaped deposition; Gates said his company never leaned on Intel to make them shut down their software development or conspire to screw with Java, while McGeady claims such overtures happened "repeatedly and on multiple occasions." Whom to trust? It's a judgment call, and our judgment says trust the guy with the cooler head when things degenerate into an insult-flinging flame war.

According to an IDG News Service article, Microsoft's lawyer-of-the-minute Steven Holley (we notice that the sarcastic and whiny Ted Edelman has been benched-- good move on Microsoft's part) brought forth evidence that McGeady had been called a "prima donna" by Intel representatives, in an attempt to discredit McGeady as a vengeful employee with a grudge. When Holly asked McGeady if being called a "prima donna" made him angry, McGeady replied, "I've been told much worse." Holly then tried a similar tack, claiming that McGeady equated Microsoft with Satan because he once penned a memo entitled "Sympathy for the Devil." The memo alluded to Microsoft's purchase of the Rolling Stones song "Start Me Up" for use in Windows 95 promotions, and suggested the alternate Stones song if Intel were shopping for a corporate theme. Leave it to a Microsoft lawyer to go for the humorless, literal interpretation; maybe McGeady should have included a ";-)".

But that's the cool thing-- McGeady never lost his patience or his sense of humor. When accused of equating Microsoft with Satan, he simply laughed and pointed out that it was a literary allusion. He went on to say that his tendency to try to make memos interesting to read was "a product of [his] misspent liberal arts education." Well, as liberal arts weenies in the tech world ourselves, we see where McGeady's coming from, and he seems like a straight shooter. Thumbs up, and here's hoping that cooler heads prevail.