Remember once the dust cleared last May and people actually had a little time to think about the iMac's announced specifications? Eventually somebody noticed that there was no floppy, and thence came the predictions of doom. Somebody else noticed that there were zero expansion slots, and voilà-- more predictions of doom. Uh-oh, no legacy ports like SCSI, ADB, or serial-- guess what? Yup, still more predictions of doom. And yet, as faithful viewer Argonaut notes via an Bloomberg article, the iMac was the number one selling personal computer in the retail channel last month. Not a whole lot of doom there, especially since the iMac's been available for nearly a year now.

So with that in mind, let's consider the iBook's potential pitfalls. First, price. $1599 may be a great price for such a fast and stylish laptop, but it's a far cry from the $1000 ideal that Steve and Co. tried to hit. (We bet the active-matrix display had a lot to do with the differential.) Is it cheap enough to penetrate the consumer and educational market? There are also a lot of ports and slots missing; it's no surprise that serial, ADB, and SCSI are gone, but there's no video-out, so you can't use the iBook with a monitor, and there's no PCMCIA/CardBus slot, so there's no way to add any additional functionality beyond the AirPort wireless networking card. Heck, there isn't even a microphone or a sound-in jack, so forget about any kind of cool recording projects for school, kiddies-- you won't be able to narrate the voiceover for your AppleWorks-based presentation, and you won't be able to use the nifty ViaVoice voice dictation software demonstrated during the keynote unless someone hacks together something for the USB port. But at least there's a headphone jack so you can listen to CDs and MP3s on the bus...

But the way we see it, the biggest problem is the "biggest" problem. The iBook is a behemoth. We can only assume that when David Pogue referred to the iBook as "delightfully small" in his early review, he had been touring the local crack houses before settling down to write. Yes, it's a whole lot smaller than the iMac, but the iBook weighs in at 6.6 pounds-- seven-tenths of a pound heavier than Apple's professional laptop offering, and as far as we could tell when hefting the thing, it's every bit as big and at least as thick. So much for the rumors that the P1 would be a subnotebook-style minibook; we bet the Japanese, in particular, are not pleased. We can only scratch our heads in wonder while trying to determine what Apple was thinking when they decided to make an education-targeted portable nearly seven pounds in weight. Sure, the nifty handle helps, but in this day and age of physical unfitness, there are probably fifth-graders out there who couldn't even lift anything heavier than a PlayStation controller, let alone lug it to school and back.

So is the iBook doomed to fail? Hardly. I mean, have you seen this thing? Apple's probably going to sell a gazillion of them. But there's a lot of room for improvement if Apple really expects the iBook to be used as a primary computer, even by a schoolkid. And if not, we hope we start seeing iMacs and iBooks bundled together at a substantial savings sometime in the near future...