Okay, so as those of you who watch "Just Shoot Me" and "ER" already know, NBC finally aired a commercial for the new iMac last night-- twice. (According to MacMinute, it aired at 21:56 ET and again at 22:25 ET-- man, those guys are thorough.) And yes, we did see both airings ourselves, but many thanks anyway to faithful viewer Plow King and the 4.6 million others who wrote in to tell us about it. In fact, since faithful viewer The Jackalope claims to have spotted the ad during "Family Guy" as well, we've probably got it on TiVo, too, ready for repeat viewings-- which is nice, because we definitely liked it. When we saw it, the first thought to enter our minds was, "Wow, that's a great ad." The second was, "good gravy, we'll actually have something to write about tomorrow."

For those of you who may have missed it, for some reason Apple hasn't posted a QuickTime version yet; faithful viewer resteves notes that MacRumors has a viewable copy, but in case you're addicted to text, here's a brief description: Some Guy is walking down the street and passes an iMac in a store window, whose screen swivels to follow Guy's motion. Guy, noticing this, stops, and sees the iMac "looking" at him. Slightly unnerved but intrigued, he rolls his head. The iMac rolls its, er, screen. Guy turns to the right; the iMac pivots accordingly. Guy does a little jumpy thing from side to side; the iMac's screen does the same. Finally, Guy leans in and sticks out his tongue-- and the iMac sticks out its drive tray. Guy backs away smiling and notices Some Woman staring at him. He looks suitably embarrassed. The iMac straightens up, the Apple logo appears on its screen, Jeff Goldblum intones "wait 'til you meet the new iMac," the slogan "Think different" does not appear, and blammo-- Apple's out whatever thirty seconds of prime time ad space costs these days.

So why do we like this commercial so much? Simple-- it's cute, it's entertaining, and it makes maximum use of those precious thirty seconds to exploit the iMac's biggest drawing power: most people just find it really cool. It has star power. It has personality. Of course it's a stupendously powerful computer and packs a ridiculous number of features for its price, but trying to convey that in half a minute by rattling off specs would be pointless. The idea here is to get an image stuck in people's minds and get them curious. The only real way to appreciate the iMac to its fullest is to see one in person, and this commercial just may prompt people to go do that. Besides, the ad does demonstrate the iMac's most prominent and unique feature: a gorgeous LCD screen that pivots on a shiny metal arm. That's going to garner a lot more attention than a thirty-second explanation of how an 800 MHz G4 is "a lot faster than it sounds, really, we promise."

By the way, we note that less than six hours after we pointed out the lack of iMac TV commercials, Apple went ahead and broadcast one. Deciding whether that's a) just a coincidence, b) evidence that Apple does everything we say, or c) proof that Steve Jobs just likes to make us look like dorks is left as an exercise for the viewer.

Wuh-oh-- sounds like there might be some trouble a-brewin'. Unless you're pretty new to this game, you probably recall that when Apple unveiled the original Power Mac G4 back in 1999, Steve made a big deal about how it was the first personal "supercomputer," based on its unprecedented gigaflop ("one billion floating-point operations per second") performance. Indeed, two and a half years later, Apple is still singing the same tune; even now, its web site states that "the Dual 1 GHz Power Mac is a twin-engined supercomputer with a phenomenal peak performance of 15 gigaflops." And who's going to argue with that? After all, that sure is a whole lotta flops.

Well, we'll tell you who's going to argue with that: the well-respected but incredibly confusingly-named German technical journal c't, that's who. It just so happens that c't got its mitts on one of those new dual 1 GHz wonders and subjected it to a supposedly platform-independent benchmark called SPEC CPU2000, which is meant to be a test of raw processor speed. The results were not pretty. Apparently a 1 GHz G4 running Mac OS X in single user mode (i.e. no Aqua to slow things down) performed about as well as a 1 GHz Pentium III (yes, Pentium III) running Linux in the integer tests. Yecch.

But where things get really surprising is in the floating-point tests, where you might expect the G4 to excel; c't claims that the G4 only ran about half as quickly as the Pentium III, gigaflops notwithstanding. Keep in mind that the PIII is a year and a half old. The magazine acknowledges that "in theory the PowerPC FPU with its 32 registers ought to have been superior to the x86 FPU with its antiquated stack structure and eight registers only," but it wasn't-- leading c't to state that even the beefiest G4 currently available is "no 'supercomputer,' not by a long shot."

When informed of this bold statement, Apple's official response was "Is too." c't then issued a formal followup reply: "Is not." Soon thereafter, Apple stunned the industry by reiterating its position with a second "Is too." c't representatives have yet to issue a response, but industry experts strongly suspect that the magazine is currently drafting one along the general lines of "Is not, infinity." It would then fall to Apple to justify its position with an argument such as "Is too, infinity times infinity, plus your mom told us you were adopted from the monkey house at the zoo." At that point, most analysts feel that c't would then concede the debate by running home crying.

Of course, none of that changes the fact that the G4 got the pants beaten off it when it comes to the SPEC benchmark, but hey, everyone knows that benchmarks can be sketchy ways to measure true performance. If you're a graphic artist, we're going to go out on a limb and guess that you probably don't run SPEC CPU2000 all day-- you run Photoshop. And as Steve is so fond of demonstrating at every possible turn, the G4 totally kicks royal booty at running Photoshop, other benchmarks notwithstanding. We sure wouldn't mind hearing why the G4 lamed out so badly on those SPEC tests, though; after all, there's a reputation as a supercomputer at stake, here.

What better way to kick off a weekend than with some completely unconfirmed buyout rumors? Oh, but don't get your hopes up too high-- this isn't another "Disney buys Apple" thingy. Nosiree; this time around, the rumors have Apple cast as the buyer instead of the buyee. And just who is this mysterious takeover target, you ask? Well, if the whispers flying around can be believed, it's none other than Alias|Wavefront, those 3D wizards who churn out Maya. Could Apple be looking to leap into the 3D biz?

It's not all that far-fetched. Remember, it was revealed just a month ago that Apple bought Nothing Real, who makes one of the premiere compositing applications on the market; grabbing Maya as well might be part of an overall strategy to cement Apple as a major player in Hollywood. And there's little question that things over at Alias|Wavefront might be a bit shaky right about now; faithful viewer ajs points out a Macworld article which details how the Toronto-based company is shutting down both of its U.S. offices and losing one of its cofounders as a result. He also notes a forum post by at Architosh's editor claiming "superb inside information that Apple is likely going to buy a market-leading 3D modeling/rendering and animation application."

Now, we don't know from "superb inside information," but we've definitely been hearing some buzz lately about certain very big Apple personalities doing the high-level meeting thing north of the border, flashing some cash and showing a little interest. Personally, though, we're not at all certain how a potential purchase of Alias|Wavefront meshes with the company shutting down its U.S. offices; surely the closer to Cupertino, the better, right? Unless, of course, Apple is only looking to buy Maya, and not the company itself.

On the other hand, closing offices might imply to some that Alias|Wavefront is in a serious financial bind, which might make it a lot more amenable to outright buyout offers; the official corporate spin as seen at MacCentral denies that the company's in trouble, but then again, it is official corporate spin, so we'd hardly expect anything other than the standard "this is just a restructuring measure" kind of stuff. Whatever. It's all just rumor and speculation so far, so don't go taking it as gospel or anything-- but if you want to spend the weekend thinking idle thoughts about what might be next on Steve's shopping list, hey, don't expect us to try to stop you.