Miffed by the offer of a free coupon book stuffed with deals on non-iMac-compatible equipment? Irked by the lack of reasonable space for the iMac in the Sunday newspaper circulars? Following massive customer dissatisfaction over the nature of CompUSA's half-assed iMac promotions thus far, representatives of that superstore chain are clarifying things to the good folks over at MacCentral.

First, the coupon book: seemingly none of the CompUSA reps are denying that it's lame city to provide coupons for such iMac-unfriendly items as PowerBook Zip drives and floppy disks. That's a semi-positive sign. As for the lack of advertising in CompUSA's Sunday circulars, that's supposed to change over the next few weeks, as the iMac gets increasing coverage, finally culminating with a full-splash feature on the front page on the 16th of August. (But given CompUSA's less-than-wonderful track record regarding Apple advertising, don't expect it to stay there.) In addition, CompUSA stores are receiving other marketing materials to help generate interest in the iMac, such as large "iMac is Coming" banners, iMac fold-outs, etc. that should really raise awareness of the product. The best news, however, is that the higher-ups expect the iMac to be "the best-selling computer in CompUSA's history," and are actually offering bonuses to every store that books 45 pre-orders before the iMac is actually released. It's about time that salespeople got incentives to sell Apple equipment.

And finally, it sounds as though the iMacs are selling (or pre-selling) well, despite the lack of decent advertising on CompUSA's part thus far. According to the Bloomberg News, only two days after the (albeit lame) coupon book promotion started, CompUSA has reported a "stronger than expected" number of pre-orders. There are no details provided on just how strong a response there's actually been, but as professional Apple-watcher Lou Mazzuchelli notes, CompUSA expected a lot of pre-orders, so the fact that they're seeing even more than expected is a "good thing." At this rate, we at AtAT are indeed expecting a shortage of iMacs when the systems are initially released, so if you want one soon, it's definitely a good time to but your name on a pre-order list. C'mon, there's probably something in that coupon book that tickles your fancy...

On the other hand, if you're slightly more of a "power user" who needs a few PCI slots, or you already have a sizeable investment in peripherals that wouldn't work on an iMac without some costly and unwieldy conversion products, you might be interested in a new Power Mac G3 instead. As we mentioned earlier, Apple's taking an axe to prices on the current G3 systems this weekend, so soon you can expect to pay several hundred dollars less for a seriously fast machine. But if you need even more speed, MacNN and other sources are reporting that Apple plans to release new G3's based on Motorola's just-announced low-voltage 300, 333, and 366 MHz processors.

The good news is that all reports show that the speed-bumped G3 systems will make their debut sometime between August 12th and 14th. If true, that should eliminate most concerns about a G3 system shortage; the reported mid-August release date makes these machines a couple of weeks earlier than the previous earliest guess about a G3 product refresh. Note, however, that the new systems will first be available only in limited quantities, so talk to your dealers now if you have to have one in August.

So mid-August is gearing up to be one of the most exciting times in Apple's history. Between the iMac's release, the expected availability of these new super-charged G3's, and the lower prices on existing G3 systems introduced only last November, it sure looks like Apple's pushing hard for the holy grail of increasing market share and revenue this quarter. It used to be all about profit. Now it's all about growth-- and kick-ass products.

Hmmm, what's all this buzz over at Mac OS Rumors about the iMac possibly having PCI expansion capabilities? Apparently the little blue lump does in fact rely on the PCI bus in order to shuttle data between the main processor and the USB and graphics subsystems. That's an intriguing bit of information, especially for those of us who would love to see some kind of hack that could allow a PCI expansion chassis-- even a single-slot one-- to connect to the iMac. And as Rumors supposes, some kind of passthrough card that sits between the motherboard and the processor card might allow just that, if some third-party company were clever enough to come up with such a thing.

Of course, that point is moot if the shipping iMacs retain the special proprietary slot that existed in at least some of the preproduction models. Remember the first iMacs that got dragged around from users' group to users' group? Those models had external monitor ports peeking out through a knockout panel in the iMac's port bay. While it's been widely reported that shipping iMacs will not have the capability to drive an external monitor (the ports on the demo units were there to allow the connection of a projection module, making demos easier to give), we sincerely doubt that Apple would actually remove whatever architecture it used to attach the extra video circuitry to the motherboard. That circuitry is reportedly a custom-pinout proprietary PCI expansion slot.

Indeed, all of the iMacs AtAT used at the MacWorld Expo still had a knockout panel in the port bay, implying the existence of an expansion slot behind it. None of them had a monitor port installed. And while those iMacs were still preproduction models, we strongly suspect that the shipping systems will still have a proprietary and unpublicized expansion slot on the motherboard. But if so, why is Apple keeping mum about it? Is it for legal reasons? After all, if they won't market the iMac as "processor-upgradeable" because no one may ever sell a processor upgrade for it, mightn't they also balk at calling the system "expandable" as well? Very interesting... We can't wait until the iMac actually ships to see what changes, if any, were made to the original motherboard.