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Right Mac, Wrong Price (5/27/99)
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Uh-oh-- you may want to prepare for a rocky kick-off to the whole iMac era at Sears. Following early reports that iMacs had already surfaced in a couple of Sears stores, your AtAT crew took a trip down to the local mall to see what was up. We took the escalator up to the home electronics department, and there it was: a beautiful Blueberry iMac, resplendent among the throngs of dull beige boxes. It was the first thing we saw as we got off the escalator, since it was set up right at the end of the aisle, and we were therefore pleased that it got such prime real estate in the computer department. So far so good.
But when we approached the machine, we saw that all it displayed onscreen was the Finder's desktop. There were no demos running, or even loaded; this appeared to be a stock iMac pulled from the box, plugged in, turned on, set up, and left at the Finder. We tried to make the system a little more engaging by firing up Nanosaur and leaving it at the animated splash screen, which features a nifty 3D dinosaur running through the mist as jungle-drum-type music plays in the background. We also noticed a total lack of any marketing materials or product literature-- it was just the iMac, standing alone. We're pretty confident, though, that the marketing situation will change starting this weekend.
However, we're not very confident about we consider to be the biggest problem with this whole Sears scenario: the iMac was listed at $1299. For those of you keeping score at home, that's a full hundred bucks higher than Apple's own list price. We've really got to wonder about the wisdom of putting iMacs in 800 consumer-oriented department stores all across the country and then trying to sell them at a higher price than anywhere else. So is it just a mistake, or is Sears really planning to keep iMacs at the $1299 price point? Presumably we'll know after this weekend's big kickoff.
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SceneLink (1566)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/27/99 episode: May 27, 1999: Apple caves to pressure from its "loyal and passionate" AppleShare IP customers, and cuts the price of the 6.2 upgrade from $499 to $0. Meanwhile, Sears seems bent on going in the other direction and selling the iMac for a hundred dollar more than list price, and something very strange has happened to one of Apple's QuickTime streams...
Other scenes from that episode: 1565: Leaning On The Man (5/27/99) Who says Apple never listens to its customers? Okay, sure, sometimes things have to get ugly before they start paying attention, but when they make a particularly boneheaded move, it seems like these days they're much more likely to admit the mistake and make amends... 1567: Ghost In The Machine (5/27/99) As much as we love following the day-to-day drama of Apple Computer, we can't help but feel that recently things just haven't been nearly as surreal as we'd like. There haven't been as many bizarre occurrences to stop us in our tracks and make us go, "Huh."...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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