There's only one week left before the iMac is officially released, and we'll all finally see if the demand lives up to the hype. Rumors about rampant pre-orders continue to fly, fueling the frenzied anticipation of what has the potential to be one of the best-selling computers in the history of the industry. The numbers keep growing, and now Mac OS Rumors claims an Apple source says Apple has been inundated with 350,000 pre-orders for their first real consumer Macintosh in years.

It's important to distinguish between reseller pre-orders and customer ones; the alleged 350,000 pre-orders are most likely from resellers to Apple's distributors, which simply means that resellers expect to sell one heck of a lot of iMacs to customers. As for the number of customers who have actually pre-ordered iMacs from dealers, we haven't heard any combined real numbers, but three days after they started accepting pre-orders for the iMac, CompUSA reported that response was "better than anticipated." That bodes well for Apple, since CompUSA was very enthusiastic about their optimism in iMac consumer demand.

At this point, the real question is, will Apple have any chance of filling the full number of pre-orders? 350,000 iMacs is almost as many machines as they had hoped to sell in the whole quarter. Even if the rumors of Apple building nothing but iMacs (at the expense of PowerBooks and Power Mac G3's) are true, can Apple produce even close to the number of iMacs each reseller has pre-ordered?

Apparently, resellers are resigned to their fate: they seem to be accepting the cold, hard fact that there's no way Apple can provide as many iMacs as they've been asked for. A Computer Retail Week article claims that several resellers are changing their "iMac Day" plans based on the "certainty" that they won't get as many iMacs as they ordered.

Apple's official stance on the iMac supply issue is that they are "planning" to have enough on hand, but they're "uncertain" if they can provide enough to fill the demand. Moreover, they've reportedly told several retailers that they should expect shortages. Unfortunately, they're not telling resellers exactly how short their orders will be, which is leaving store managers in a tizzy, unsure of just how hard to promote a machine that they may not actually have on hand to sell. And right now it looks like they won't know how many iMacs they'll have on launch day until the trucks actually show up with the boxes on board. Some CompUSA sales associates are even going so far as to predict that they won't even have enough iMacs on hand to fill all of the customer pre-orders they've taken.

Again, we can't stress this point enough-- if you're serious about getting an iMac as close to the launch date as possible, call around and place a pre-order at a reseller who hasn't already been swamped with them, if you can find one. Apple may yet pull off a miracle and supply enough iMacs to satisfy the initial demand, but if they can't, you want to make sure you're as close to the front of the line as possible. You've got nothing to lose, except the possibility of getting caught in a "Tickle Me Elmo"-style brawl as crazed Mac users all over enter the fray, fists a-flyin', transforming unfortunate CompUSA stores into smouldering heaps of blackened rubble. Hey, it could happen.

One of the pundits who claims to have actual numbers on how many iMacs Apple has been able to produce thus far is Robert Cringely, self-appointed martyr to the flaming email arrows of many a Mac EvangeLista. In his latest column, he reveals that Apple hopes to have 30,000 iMacs in stores by next Saturday's launch date, but that as of last week, they had only been able to produce about 5000 of the little buggers. Worse yet, he claims that a random sampling of the machines so far produced revealed a whopping 11% out-of-box failure rate. Holy Lemon, Batman! Is Apple so determined to compete with the "big boys" of the PC world that they're now attempting to adopt their traditional failure rates, too?

Now, we have no idea if Cringely's information is true or not, but he certainly doesn't know any less about Apple's iMac production than we do. We just find it a little hard to believe that Apple is capable of producing anything with an 11% failure rate. Still, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that Apple was still ironing out some fairly serious bugs in its iMac production process. Let's just hope they figured out what was causing the quality problem and fixed it early last week, giving them a chance to roll out a quality product in time for the scheduled introduction...

...Or else we can all prepare for plenty of press reminiscent of the old days. There's an awful lot riding on a successful iMac rollout. AtAT is keeping its collective fingers crossed.