Okay, now that we've all had a full day to digest the whole iMac G5 info blitz, where do you stand on Apple's latest all-in-one desktop design? (The first person who says "on the back, about an inch to the right of the top FireWire port" gets a smack upside the head.) Because judging by the white-hot messages sizzling in our inbox, most Mac fans' gut reactions were pretty polar on the look: drool or dry heave, with not much in between. Of course, those with the strongest opinions are always the ones who bother to write in about them, but we're still sensing a lot of the same love-it-or-hate-it vibe that accompanied the last iMac design to hit the airwaves. Well, yesterday we here at AtAT were sort of lukewarm on the aesthetics of the iMac G5, but now we're pretty comfortable with coming down squarely on the "drool / love it" side of the fence.

What made up our minds? Simple: seeing it in video form, instead of focusing endlessly on those few still product shots on Apple's web site. (We don't know why, but Apple's product photos just never look anywhere near as gorgeous as the products really are.) The QuickTime VR let us get a better overall sense of the geometry of the unit, at which point we started feeling better about the design, but it was really the product video shown at the Philnote (as noted by faithful viewer Ryan Stern) that tipped the scales by giving us a much clearer sense of how its lines intersect and surprising us by how good the glossy white plastic looks against that anodized aluminum base. Okay, sure, the most concise and accurate summary of the new iMac's look is still "assless eMac" (as forwarded to us by faithful viewer Alan Brooks), but our main problem with the eMac's look has always been that it's just too bulky to pull off its white-and-curves motif without looking like some monstrous kitchen appliance gone awry. If the iMac G5 is an eMac post-assectomy, well, it's far the better for it.

Move beyond the issue of the iMac's new look, and the vast gulf of opinion narrows a bit-- especially among the professional pundits out there, most of the loudest of whom seem to think that the iMac G5 is a happy lil' sack of lead preparing to pin Apple to the ocean floor. True, several analysts see the new system as a major plus and have upgraded their ratings on AAPL appropriately, but a chorus of the usual suspects is doing its best to drown out the murmurs of approval. For example, faithful viewer Joe Mac User notes the presence of typical Rob Enderle cluelessness in a Mercury News article; apparently ol' Rob feels that every all-in-one computer that will ever come to market is doomed to fail just like IBM's and Gateway's, because "consumers want the freedom to change desktop monitors."

Oh, yeah. That's why the original iMac was such a flop. Not that there isn't a market for a headless iMac, of course, but there are plenty of people who like the simplicity of a single, unified device. For Rob to say that IBM's and Gateway's all-in-ones failed because they were all-in-ones (and not, for example, because they sucked rocks audibly) sortakinda ignores the fact that a certain blue-green all-in-one saved Apple instead of sinking it.

And yet, believe it or not, as faithful viewer mrmgraphics points out, John Dvorak manages to sound even more brain-dead over at Investor's Business Daily. Unfortunately the link seems to have died, so you'll have to take our word for the fact that he registers apparent surprise that Apple "jammed the entire computer into the screen, making the idea of changing 'monitors' or screens impractical," implying that he had no idea that the iMac has always been an all-in-one design. He would also "like to know what happened to all those fancy colors Apple was promoting," evidently unaware that Apple hasn't shipped a non-white consumer Mac for over two and a half years. This is all especially weird considering how he didn't seem to mind the built-in-screen concept and the lack of pretty colors back when he praised the iMac G4's design to the skies in January of 2002.

And this is just a taste of the naysaying. There's Salkever over at BusinessWeek calling the iMac G5 "form over function" and a "pretty package but nothing much that is new or different on the inside" (like, say, a 64-bit consumer PC that takes up about as much desk space as your average three-hole punch). There's Paul Jackson of Forrester Research spouting off at CNET about how iMac G5 will fail because-- wait for it-- an AirPort Express card doesn't come standard and it doesn't have a TV tuner built-in. If we could roll our eyes any further, we'd be staring down our own digestive tracts.

Well, time will tell. For our part, we love the specs, we love the price, and now we even love the look-- and that's just from seeing QuickTime video; once we see one of these in person, we'll probably have to Taser ourselves to keep from flinging a handful of credit cards at the nearest salesperson. If Apple can pitch this puppy effectively (Joe Shmoe has no idea what a great deal a G5-based system is at these prices, but the whole "hey, it's like an iPod" thing might work) and IBM can crank out enough chips to keep up with demand, we think the iMac G5 might collar more switchers this holiday season than the Switch campaign ever could. Who knows? Maybe Janie Porche won't be the only one saving Christmas this year.

Just to cleanse the palate, let's change the subject to a market in which Apple isn't the underdog, shall we? In the realm of digital downloadable music sales, the iTunes Music Store is zooming so far out in front of everyone else it's actually experiencing relativistic time dilation-- and we're only sort of kidding. Faithful viewer Scott Naness ran some numbers, and with the latest revelation that the iTMS recently sold its 125,000,000th song, he points out that the measured or extrapolated interval during which it's taken Apple to sell another 25 million songs keeps dropping precipitously-- from 231 days to 91 days to 73 days to 62 days to the most recent 52 days. Sales increases due to deeper market penetration, or time getting wonky because of the iTMS's near-light-speed travel? You be the judge.

Not that Apple shows any signs of slowing down; in fact, it just keeps coming up with more and more ideas to keep those engines roaring. The latest, as first pointed out to us by faithful viewer Pepe, is something we've been wondering about for a while: the iTunes Affiliate Program. Yes, it's finally here: affiliates who link to iTMS content from their web sites will reap five percent of any sales that result from said links. In other words, if we here at AtAT were to sign up, and you were to click on one of those goofy song references we occasionally sprinkle through our episodes for added zest, and then you were to actually buy the song, we'd be the happy recipients of a shiny nickel.

[LEGAL NOTE: By including our third public use of the phrase "shiny nickel" since August 25th, this scene hereby fulfills our legal obligation to the Society for Nickel Evangelism, as decreed by the U.S. District Court following our alleged involvement in the traffic incident which resulted in the SNE offices being "structurally compromised" by the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.]

Note, however, that we said "if"-- because Apple rejected our application to join the iTunes Affiliate Program, citing "a number of factors which may include: presence of Apple competitors on your Web site; Fit of Apple's messaging and branding with your Web site; traffic levels of your Web site; a well-defined Privacy Policy on your Web site." Since we don't show Dell ads like some other Mac-oriented sites we've come across and we get way more traffic than Apple's required 1,000 unique monthly visitors, either the anarchic tone of our Privacy Policy put them off or we just don't "fit" with Apple's "messaging and branding." Considering that certain unnamed third-party sites have told us in the past that they've almost been denied Apple ad revenue and press access to Macworld Expo simply for linking to this show, we're betting the prize is behind Door Number Two. (Hey, we're Evil™! Who knew?)

So apparently we won't be hearing the beautiful sound of plinking nickels when viewers make their iTMS purchases, which we'll have to classify as a Darn Shame. If you're desperate to turn your music purchases into AtAT-sustaining affiliate revenue, unfortunately instant gratification for 99 cents a pop isn't an option; you'll have to do the last-century thing and score full physical CDs from Amazon.com/Amazon.ca/Amazon.co.uk, living with the burdens of choosing your own digital music format and bitrate to work with any software or device you choose, ripping your own totally DRMless files by hand, and storing a disc that serves as little more than a pristine and lossless archival backup together with printed album art and song lyrics. Ooooo, what a grind. Sorry about that.

Whoa, there, Trigger, slam on the brakes-- when we mentioned yesterday that the new iMac G5 represented a major step forward in the journey toward the holy grail of a G5-based PowerBook, we didn't mean you should start warming up your clickin' finger in preparation for the imminent placing of a preorder. All we said was that Apple's new two-inch-thick iMac is loads closer to portability than any G5-based system we've seen to date. Given that the Power Mac G5 is the size of a Buick and has more fans than Hilary Duff (albeit quieter ones) and the Xserve (aside from being over two feet deep from front to back) reportedly puts out more heat than your average Duraflame log, that's not quite the same as saying that a PowerBook G5 will hit store shelves before Thanksgiving. So cool it.

Indeed, people are getting antsy enough about the ramifications of the iMac's relatively tiny form factor that Apple has elected to perform a little crowd control. The Mac Observer cites Tom Boger, director of Apple's worldwide product marketing, as saying that "consumers shouldn't expect the G5 in a portable for the foreseeable future." Quoth the Bogerman, "the new iMac G5 is thin, but (the G5) is not thin enough for a laptop right now. There are great challenges in putting a G5 processor in a laptop... You're not going to see a G5 in a laptop anytime soon." He then "ruled out any G5 laptop this year."

This shouldn't come as any particular surprise, since we've all heard dire PowerBook G5 time frames from multiple Apple employees for ages, now-- Greg Joswiak was the first to throw cold water on the dream in June of last year, and just over a year ago Steve Jobs himself said he'd "like to have it by the end of" 2004. Now that it's a year later and even Steve's promise of a 3 GHz G5 hasn't yet come to pass, Boger's 2005-at-best projection seems right in line with what any reasonable person should expect.

Then again, doesn't that name ring any bells? Let's not forget that Apple itself publicly downplayed the likelihood of a G5-based iMac as recently as early June-- and guess who the mouthpiece was? That's right, our ol' buddy Tom Boger! If you think back, you might recall him stating that squeezing a G5 into an iMac chassis would be "the same story" as wedging one into a PowerBook and saying that such a feat "would be a heck of a challenge"-- and now the iMac G5 is slated to ship barely three months later. What's more, Apple has already admitted that it had originally planned to ship the iMac G5 in mid-July, meaning that only about six weeks prior to a planned product rollout, Tom Boger was telling the press that said product was probably much further away.

And now Mr. Boger's currently taking pains to warn us not to expect a PowerBook G5 anytime soon, even using some of the same verbiage-- "great challenges" versus "heck of a challenge," etc. Suuuuuure, Tom; fool us once, shame on you, but fool us twice, and we've either been drinking too much or not enough.

So you folks know what this all means, don't you? Let's see, six weeks from today, give or take... Hey, screw Thanksgiving-- PowerBook G5s by Columbus Day! Woo-hoo!