Sure, Apple's breakthrough consumer Mac has a great beat and you can dance to it, but the kids who said the whole thing was a flash in the pan now have more evidence to back up their claim. PC Data is the "Billboard" of computer sales numbers, and according to their latest figures, the iMac's short stint at the top of the charts was ended in December by heavy-hitter Compaq. MacCentral has more on the iMac's drop from first to third place.

So is this the start of the iMac's inevitable fall from the top, or just a slight bump in the road? December sales figures are both desperately important and tricky to interpret, because it can be tough to figure out what goes on in holiday shoppers' heads. There's little question that the iMac has plenty of "wow" appeal, but one simple factor may have caused it to fall from grace over the holidays: price. At $1299, holiday shoppers (who already had mounting credit card debt from all the other presents they had to buy) may certainly have seen the iMac as too little for too much. (We're not counting Best Buy's sudden unannounced panic-stricken price drop that put the iMac at $999 for a couple of days, before Apple allegedly "convinced" them to stick closer to the standard $1299.)

Assuming that PC Data's correct in stating that iMac sales share slipped in December (and we see no reason whatsoever to doubt them), the big question on our minds is, what's going to happen to the relative numbers for January? The speed-bumped, storage-increased iMacs with their new fruit flavors and lower sticker price will almost certainly boost sales again, but given that January is more than half over and most stores still don't have the new iMacs in stock, any sales increase will affect February's statistics more than January's. On the other hand, Apple's lifting of MAP price requirements has led to a glut of $999 Bondi blue iMacs in the channel, and people seem to be snapping them up; just yesterday, your friendly AtAT crew stopped in at the local Microcenter to see what was kicking, and saw two separate customers wheeling iMacs back to their cars. The Mac section of the store was seeing a lot of traffic, which leads us to believe that the sub-$1000 iMac will be a January hit. Guess we'll know for sure in a month. Too bad the iMac's unofficial reduction to $999 didn't happen in mid-December, hmmm?

Meanwhile, Apple's stock price has taken a beating lately, too. After hitting a three-year high of $47.50 last week, it dropped to $41.31 after some very heavy trading-- right after Apple posted some terrific quarterly results. Most stock-watchers seem to blame the fall on two factors: profit-taking from investors who might simply feel that Apple can't possibly get any better than they are now, and the downgrading of AAPL from "buy" to "neutral" by financial analysts Salomon Smith Barney.

Profit-taking seems to happen a lot after Apple posts a good quarter, possibly because AAPL attracts a lot of investors who bought the stock purely due to its growth potential. The Salomon Smith Barney downgrade is slightly more interesting, though. Their big reason for taking AAPL down a notch was their claim that Apple was "channel stuffing," or artificially inflating their sales numbers by shipping more machines to dealers than those dealers could reasonably be expected to sell. But Apple Recon claims that Apple is innocent of such a move, hinting that the extra machines in the channel came from Best Buy ordering way more iMacs than they were able to sell. That would make sense, given Best Buy's clueless attempts at Mac sales. Remember, they're the ones who hit the panic button and suddenly started to unload iMacs for $999 in December, back when such a low price constituted a fairly hefty per-box loss.

Recon also points out that Salomon Smith Barney claims that Apple stuffed "five weeks of iMac inventory" into the channel, which would potentially represent hundreds of thousands of iMacs. That's obviously not correct. So why would Salomon Smith Barney say such a thing? Ready for a conspiracy-less conspiracy theory? An anonymous Apple employee contacted us to note that, prior to the downgrade, Apple changed their default broker for the Employee Stock Purchase Plan and their Employee Options program. The new broker is eTrade, and the old one was... Salomon Smith Barney. Hmmmm... Thousands of Apple employees no longer doing business with Salomon Smith Barney-- is there a bitter taste in the air? Do we hear the distant sound of an axe grinding? It's purely hearsay at this point, but it's an interesting theory, nonetheless...

Isn't FireWire cool? It's powered, hot-pluggable, faster than most kinds of SCSI, supports up to 63 simultaneously-connected devices, and simply rocks for transferring digital video. For instance, the whole idea of just unplugging a tiny hard disk from one Mac and plugging it into another-- without having to worry about ID numbers, termination, or even a power source-- and just having it mount live on the desktop is truly a wonderful thought. Heck, it's even got the coolest name of any connectivity technology we can think of, assuming you call it "FireWire" and not "IEEE 1394."

Here's the thing, though-- FireWire is an Apple technology. More than that, it's an Apple technology that hasn't quite caught on yet. Apple themselves have only just started shipping Macs with FireWire on the motherboard, and even though bigwigs like Microsoft and Intel are reportedly pushing the whole FireWire idea, the biggest obstacle to widespread adoption might be Apple themselves. According to a CNET article, Apple is no longer licensing FireWire to manufacturers for a flat fee, but is instead charging about $1 per port. That means computers and peripherals using FireWire will be more expensive to produce-- and, therefore, more expensive to purchase.

Apple's walking a thin line, here. FireWire's taken a very long time to get as far as it has (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have recognized it since 1995), and that isn't very far at all. If Apple really wants FireWire to catch on, charging a per-port royalty might be the wrong move. On the other hand, FireWire is a killer technology, and we're positive that Apple wants to ensure that they make some real money off of it. So can Apple walk the tightrope between setting a new standard and making a hefty profit without crashing and burning?