Tired of hearing how well the iMac is selling in this country? Well, no wonder-- with two different independent studies showing the iMac as being in the top three when it comes to computers selling at retail, we can understand how you might be getting just a little sick of hearing all the good news. So for a change of pace, we're going to look at something completely different: how well the iMac is selling in Japan. Who says AtAT can't inject a little variety?

Faithful viewer Peachawat wrote in to tell us that Yahoo! Japan has daily and weekly listings showing the ranking of the best-selling computer models in the Land of the Rising Sun. While the page itself is in Japanese, all of the product names are in English, and the rankings are plainly easy to see even if you, like us, don't know a scrap of Japanese. A quick inspection of both the daily and the weekly rankings shows that the iMac is kicking some tail in Japan, too; at last check, the numbers for December 2nd show the rev. B iMac ranked first both for the day and for the week. Interestingly enough, the rev. A iMac is also still on the charts-- fourteenth daily, and fifth in weekly sales. And the Power Macintosh G3, with its more pedestrian stylings, is a big player, too-- there are models at second and fourteenth on the daily list, and sixth and fifteenth weekly.

By the way, we took this opportunity to try out the "international web browsing" feature of Mac OS 8.5, which was an optional installation. After we loaded the Japanese daily sales stats, all the text surrounding the English product names was complete gibberish. But when we selected "Japanese (Auto-Detect)" from the "Encoding" list in Netscape's "View" menu, suddenly all that gibberish turned into Japanese characters. (Of course, since we don't know any Japanese, it may very well have been Japanese gibberish, but we're pretty confident that it's intelligible language.) Pretty cool! Now if only Mac OS X will also translate it, too, we'll be in business...