Sure, Apple's breakthrough consumer Mac has a great beat and you can dance to it, but the kids who said the whole thing was a flash in the pan now have more evidence to back up their claim. PC Data is the "Billboard" of computer sales numbers, and according to their latest figures, the iMac's short stint at the top of the charts was ended in December by heavy-hitter Compaq. MacCentral has more on the iMac's drop from first to third place.

So is this the start of the iMac's inevitable fall from the top, or just a slight bump in the road? December sales figures are both desperately important and tricky to interpret, because it can be tough to figure out what goes on in holiday shoppers' heads. There's little question that the iMac has plenty of "wow" appeal, but one simple factor may have caused it to fall from grace over the holidays: price. At $1299, holiday shoppers (who already had mounting credit card debt from all the other presents they had to buy) may certainly have seen the iMac as too little for too much. (We're not counting Best Buy's sudden unannounced panic-stricken price drop that put the iMac at $999 for a couple of days, before Apple allegedly "convinced" them to stick closer to the standard $1299.)

Assuming that PC Data's correct in stating that iMac sales share slipped in December (and we see no reason whatsoever to doubt them), the big question on our minds is, what's going to happen to the relative numbers for January? The speed-bumped, storage-increased iMacs with their new fruit flavors and lower sticker price will almost certainly boost sales again, but given that January is more than half over and most stores still don't have the new iMacs in stock, any sales increase will affect February's statistics more than January's. On the other hand, Apple's lifting of MAP price requirements has led to a glut of $999 Bondi blue iMacs in the channel, and people seem to be snapping them up; just yesterday, your friendly AtAT crew stopped in at the local Microcenter to see what was kicking, and saw two separate customers wheeling iMacs back to their cars. The Mac section of the store was seeing a lot of traffic, which leads us to believe that the sub-$1000 iMac will be a January hit. Guess we'll know for sure in a month. Too bad the iMac's unofficial reduction to $999 didn't happen in mid-December, hmmm?