iMac fever continues, or so the story goes. We've been hearing all kinds of reports of rampant preorders and like hysteria. It all started with the apocryphal story of CompUSA's 70,000 iMac preorders several weeks ago, which we now assume must be preorders by CompUSA stores (and not customers), given that the SKU for the iMac only showed up in CompUSA's system for customer preorders last week. Now, most recently, a Toronto Star article mentions more evidence that the iMac has the potential to steal the show this summer.

According to the Star, a ten-store chain in Northern California called ComputerWare has booked nearly 200 customer pre-orders for the first iMacs to hit the channel. And the five-store ComputerTown chain has logged "hundreds" of preorders as well. Those numbers are much more realistic to our ears than 70,000 preorders at CompUSA; even scaling for number of stores, we couldn't expect more than a few thousand CompUSA customer preorders at the most. Still, that's nothing to sneeze at, considering the iMac is still over a month away, and advertising hasn't yet begun in earnest.

The neat thing about all this early interest is that it should help Apple avoid the slump that analysts expect will hit most computer manufacturers this summer. In fact, Apple expects to ship up to 400,000 iMacs by the end of September (though how many of those actually get sold to end-users is anyomne's guess). That's a whole lotta iMacs. We only hope that Apple isn't reversing the polarity of its blunder with the PowerBook G3 Series. With the PowerBooks, demand was way, way higher than supply. Now that Apple's creating a vast supply of iMacs, let's all hope that they aren't overestimating the demand.

Speaking of the iMac and its vast supply, it sounds like production is just about ready to ramp up for the expected August 19th ship date. Mac the Knife reports that one hundred pre-production models have been churned out by Apple's Laguna West manufacturing facility. These early versions have probably reached New York by now, and in all likelihood are being set up by union Smurfs all across the Javits Center in preparation for abuse by the rabid Expo crowd. (Your friendly AtAT staff are included in that sweaty rabble, and fully intend to mess with the iMacs as much as possible during our Expo stay.) Though one hundred doesn't sound like many for a product due on store shelves in a month, fear not-- Laguna West claims they'll be able to push out 600,000 units by Christmas. Yow!

We at AtAT are pleased to hear that the iMac appears to share certain design features with Apple's sleek PowerBook G3 Series; according to the Knife, they use the same RAM and CD-ROM drive. Now, while the use of PowerBook RAM may conceivably raise the cost of upgrading the iMac, the use of PowerBook CD-ROM drives leaves a big opening for speculation: in the PowerBook G3 Series, the CD-ROM drive slots into a media bay that can also accept a floppy module. While it's a really slim chance that Apple would use the same kind of modular design in the iMac, it sure would be a nice surprise to hear that translucent blue internal floppy drives will be available, and can be hot-swapped with the CD-ROM. We're not holding our breath, though.

Also, as has been widely reported by all sorts of rumors sources, the Knife confirms that v.90 56K drivers for the internal modem will be available soon after the iMac's release. As for the reports that the preproduction iMacs are "higher-gloss and greener" than the prototypes shown at WWDC and on Apple's Road Tour, well, we suppose we can live with that. While the original Bondi-blue goes better with our decor, we certainly can't fault Apple for wanting a little luck of the Irish.