Well, here's a quick rundown of our personal iMac day experience... after dragging our butts out of bed at 9:15 AM (an inhuman hour to rise on a Saturday morning), we called our dealer, fully expecting to be told that the iMacs still hadn't shown up, since as of 9PM the night before, they were still missing in action. To our surprise and delight, our very tired-sounding friend there informed us that the missing machines had shown up at 3AM, following a night of him screaming into the phone at various representatives of Eagle Freight, the shippers who had lost the fifteen orange boxes between Chicago and New Hampshire. Suddenly we were very, very awake. We wolfed down blueberry muffins and coffee, all the while giving thanks that we knew such a dedicated Mac dealer with solid vocal stamina and the ability to go without sleep. We piled into the AtATmobile and pointed her towards the sunny climes of beautiful tax-free New Hampshire.

About two hours later, we pulled into the parking lot of Monadnock Micro and headed inside. The three iMacs we had reserved just the day before (one for us, one for our carless friend Amy, and one for my father in Illinois) were ready to go. On a whim, we decided to spring $85 more to have another 32 MB of RAM added into the AtAT iMac, which they installed for free while we waited. After we did the credit card thing (and left some cookies for our sleep-deprived friends), we wheeled two of the big orange boxes out to the car; the third system will be shipped to my very excited father on Monday. Riddle me this, Batman: How many iMac boxes will fit in the back set of a '92 Geo Prizm sedan? The answer, unfortunately, is zero-- they don't fit through the door. But the iMac is packaged very simply. The styrofoam inside is just two blocks, a top half and a bottom half, inside one of which is set the flat cardboard box containing the keyboard, mouse, and other goodies. So in each of the car's two back seats, we placed an iMac and buckled it in tight. Then we piled the two styrofoam halves on top of each iMac, flattened out the boxes, and stowed them in the trunk. Bingo! Ready to roll.

Two more hours later, we were back in Boston. We stopped over at Amy's house to set up her new baby, which took literally about five minutes. The iMac's setup assistant walked us through entering her existing ISP settings, and before we knew it, we had connected to the Internet via MacConnect at 44 kbps. Later on, we dragged all of her old files over to the iMac from her 7300 by using a simple ethernet crossover cable, and we were done. Setup of the AtAT iMac went about as easily, and it now graces a corner of our kitchen where it replaces our old LC575. And after a day of solid play on the unit, we're happy to report that not only does everything work wonderfully well, but we haven't had a single crash yet. And the shipping iMacs are just as gorgeous as we remember them to be when we had the honor to use the preproduction units on display at last month's MacWorld Expo. There's not a doubt in our minds that Apple has a real winner on its hands. We're hoping that the rest of the world agrees with us; we're anxious to see the initial sales figures tomorrow, as well as what happens to Apple's stock price.

So let's see, for the iMac advertising campaign, Apple's got a lot of bases covered... There's the radio countdown that blitzed the airwaves last week, the new TV commercial that's supposed to premiere during Sunday's "Wonderful World of Disney" on ABC, the twelve-page pullouts in major consumer magazines, and the billboards going up in major cities all over the country. Mac retailers all over the place are plastered with banners and posters, and festooned with iMac balloons. There's even a front-page iMac ad in CompUSA's Sunday circular, which probably marks the first time that an Apple system has grabbed such a prominent display in that perennially Mac-poor publication. Did Apple forget anything?

Apparently not, according to a story on Apple's web page. In addition to all the stuff listed above, Apple even has a twenty-foot-high inflatable iMac blimp displayed on its campus. That's right; in response to one employee's off-the-cuff remark about how cool it would be to have a giant iMac blimp, Apple went ahead and had one built. Actually, they thought the idea was so cool, they had thirty-nine of them built, and the others are being displayed all over the world. There are some great photos to go with the story, and if you want, you can even download a short QuickTime 3 movie of the giant iMac being inflated.

It's a great bit of irony to see a huge, towering representation of a computer that, in reality, takes up an incredibly tiny amount of space. Suppose the blimp qualifies as "public art?" If so, I think we've found a suitable replacement for the recently-decommissioned Icon Garden. ;-)