It was a big day for Apple's public image, to be sure; following the release of some good news, Apple's stock went through the roof, relatively speaking. It actually broke 41 in heavy trading, before finally settling back down to about 39. That's the highest it's been in at least three years, and over three times higher than it was at the end of last year. The "good news" was presumably Apple's "official" number of iMac pre-orders, made public in a press release: Apple started accepting orders for the new consumer system on August 3rd, and one week later had racked up a whopping 150,000 of them-- a new record for first-week sales of any Apple product. Tom Jacobs, the CEO of Computer Town, describes the rush of pre-orders as a "frenzy in the consumer market" unmatched in his 20 years in computer retail.

Of course, it may not have been just the pre-orders that drove the stock price up... Apple also announced that over 460 Mac applications have been announced since the iMac was first unveiled back in early May. Those software packages, coupled with the 35 new hardware products announced to take advantage of the iMac's USB and Ethernet interfaces, may have done a lot in convincing Wall Street that the Mac platform won't just be sticking around-- it may actually start growing again, and by the end of the year, as Apple had stated.

As for our take on the whole thing, well, we at AtAT believe that one of the biggest factors driving up Apple's stock price is the page on Apple's web site describing how iMacs are being produced twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week at the Elk Grove manufacturing facility. And it's not necessarily even the information itself-- which has been pretty much common knowledge for the last week or so-- but the photos on the page which are the key. Those photos depict dozens of iMacs on the assembly line and in their shrink-wrapped boxes ready to ship to dealers. There's just something about seeing a herd of iMacs all huddled together that makes you believe that they really are coming this Saturday and the iMac is not just a really elaborate media hoax.

A little more information about the upcoming iMac advertising campaign has surfaced in the form of an article in Advertising Age magazine. Unsurprisingly, as with the "Think Different" campaign, Steve Jobs has his hands all over the project, though he personally downplays his role and tries to redirect the credit to Apple's ad firm TBWA Chiat/Day. Apparently the ad slogan "I think, therefore iMac" is Steve's own composition (though if he hadn't thought of it, we're sure someone else would have).

As for where these ads are going to show up, expect the usual suspects: of course there will be TV commercials, and billboards, posters, and magazine ads will be prevalent. In addition to the full pages Apple bought in major magazines for "Think Different," apparently we can also expect a 12-page glossy insert in Time, Newsweek, and a few other publications beginning on August 17th. We assume that the PowerBook G3 Series "It eats Pentium laptops for lunch" pullout must have done very well, since Apple's returning to the same strategy. (We're very interested to see what Apple and Chiat/Day come up with for a full twelve pages on the iMac, especially since the system's printed documentation is only four pages long. Tons and tons of pictures would be our guess.)

Meanwhile, AtAT viewers from all over the country are reporting that the advertising blitz has indeed begun, as Apple has seized the airwaves; people can't seem to turn on the radio without hearing an iMac ad, the likes of which were posted by Reality last week. In addition, apparently several radio stations are giving away iMacs to listeners, so if your musical tastes run towards the "adult contemporary" vein (which is the demographic Apple seems to be targeting), keep your ears open and you may just walk away with a free system. Hey, it sure beats winning free Kenny G tickets.

Okay, we haven't seen the actual magazine in question, nor have we seen this information surface anywhere but at MacNN, but apparently Newsweek reports that Apple's got a "final enticement" promotion for the iMac that buries the needle on the Whimsicalmeter®. Remember Roald Dahl's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? That's the one in which the mercurial head of a chocolate company sticks five golden tickets into five random chocolate bar wrappers, and the lucky kids who find them are given free chocolate for life and a tour of the factory. (Most of the kids are brats who can't follow the rules about the magic candy, and general wackiness ensues.)

Well, it seems that Steve "Willy Wonka" Jobs is a fan of the novel (or perhaps the movie version), as he's supposedly stuck five golden tickets into randomly selected iMac boxes. This time, the lucky recipients get free computers for life (in the form of a machine replacement each year) and a tour of the Apple factory. If Apple were run by anyone but Steve, we'd be a lot more skeptical than we are about this report.

If any of you crazy kids gets a ticket, remember-- on the tour, do as you're told, or Steve'll sic a rainbow-colored Oompa Loompa on your butt. That can't be pretty...