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Price Check on iMac (9/18/98)
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It may sound odd, but Apple's new consumer product is now being sold with consumables. In Merry Olde England, people in Cardiff and London can run down to the local supermarket to pick up a loaf of bread, a bottle of orange juice, a head of lettuce-- and an iMac. Such is the agreement that Apple U.K. has made with Tesco, a large supermarket chain, who is reportedly doing a bang-up job of selling iMacs to its shoppers. The MacNN iMac Special Report has an eyewitness report.
It sounds as though the arrangement is working out well; at the Cardiff store (which is open 24 hours a day), the reader reports seeing "at least 50 iMacs" stacked up and ready to sell, each with a sticker price of £999. An Apple employee was present and giving demos, seemingly similar to the Apple reps who have been frequenting CompUSA's on the weekends for iMac Demo Days. And the Apple rep had drawn quite a crowd; here's hoping that the iMac becomes a consumer smash in the U.K. as it has here in the U.S.
Sure, Tesco apparently isn't the typical sort of supermarket with which most of our U.S. viewers are familiar-- these particular stores seem to sell computers and electronic equipment, as well as groceries-- but we're still struck by the image of orange iMac boxes stacked at the end of the aisle next to the canned peas. We see store employees giving iMac demos next to the ones offering free samples of breakfast sausage and frozen pizza rolls. It's a surreal image, to be sure, but it makes us smile, so we're keeping it. ;-)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 9/18/98 episode: September 18, 1998: Apple secretly prepares a killer low-price PowerBook G3, for release only in limited quanities. Meanwhile, it sounds as though high-end PowerBooks are finally starting to show up in users' hands, and in the U.K., a large supermarket chain puts the consumer appeal of the iMac to the test...
Other scenes from that episode: 1023: Wall Street for Cheap (9/18/98) Sure, there were problems with the original Wall Street PowerBooks. For instance, while the 13" and 14" active-matrix screens on the higher-end systems were gorgeous, the passive-matrix 12" screen on the low-end model was less than perfect... 1024: For Love or Money (9/18/98) Speaking of faults with the original PowerBook G3 Series, probably the most severe one was the fact that actually getting one's hands on one of the higher-end models was a Herculean task. In particular, the configuration with the 292 MHz processor and the 14.1" screen was so scarce, there were people who placed orders for it the week it was released way back in May who still hadn't received it by the end of August...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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