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Turning the Tables (4/21/99)
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Bundles are fun, aren't they? It's a great way for all the various resellers to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack. Sure, everyone's pretty much selling the iMac for the same price, but at one place you might get a free copy of Tomb Raider, while at another they might throw in an extra 32 MB of RAM. Still a third might let you may an extra $100 for a color printer and cables. Your options are various and sundry, and that's always a good thing-- plus Apple gets the price they want for the iMac, and the reseller draws your attention by throwing in something that's probably cluttering their inventory anyway. Everyone's happy.
Now, it's just generally true that the more expensive the object you're buying, the cooler the bundled stuff is; if you're buying a low-profit item like some RAM, you might get a free copy of a game that came out four years ago shipped in promotional packaging. If you get a PowerBook, you might get a full copy of Virtual PC, valued at $150 or so. It's just the way the profit structure breaks down; generally, you see bundles advertised as "buy this spiffy computer and get a free copy of this nifty software!" That's why we thought is was so cool when Play Incorporated turned the tables by announcing a new promotion for its Electric Image 3D animation software: if you buy Electric Image at its full price of $2,295 before June 15th, you get a free iMac with your purchase.
And this isn't a clearance Bondi Blue iMac, either-- in fact, it's not even a fruit-flavored 266 MHz model. Nope, you get a brand-spankin'-new iMac 333, with plenty of horsepower to handle Electric Image's complex renderings. Now that's a bundle! We'd imagine that Electric Image would prefer to run on a Mac with more than 32 MB of RAM, but hey, you take what you can get. No word on whether or not you get to pick the flavor of your promotional iMac, but we have to assume that you can; they wouldn't mess with the beauty of such a cool promotion by sticking you with an iMac that clashes with the curtains in your den, would they?
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SceneLink (1481)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 4/21/99 episode: April 21, 1999: Content creation on the Mac takes a big hit as Avid confirms that they're moving all of their video editing applications development to that "other platform." Meanwhile, Connectix halts shipments of Virtual Game Station as Sony's lawsuit progresses, and Play Incorporated offers the coolest bundle offer we've seen in a good long while...
Other scenes from that episode: 1479: Avid Done Me Wrong (4/21/99) Sometimes it's easy to imagine that the Mac platform is past its darkest days and it's all sunshine and roses from here on in. What with six consecutive Street-beating Apple profits, phenomenal iMac sales, hardware and software that just keeps getting insanely greater, and Steve Jobs holding hypnotic sway over the majority of the media, it's tough not to relax a bit, kick back, and enjoy a frosty beverage... 1480: Well Running Dry (4/21/99) Odds are, if you're the kind of person who'd like to play a wide variety of Sony PlayStation games on his or her G3 Mac, you bought Connectix's Virtual Game Station at your first opportunity-- whether that meant shelling out your hard-earned cash on the show floor at last January's Macworld Expo where it was unveiled, pre-ordering from Connectix's web site and waiting anxiously for the UPS guy to show up, or simply setting up camp outside your local software store to make sure you got the first copy off the truck...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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