There was so much good news today that it's almost hard to focus on individual announcements. Certainly the Power Macintosh G4 stole the show, but we have to address a piece of information that didn't directly relate to the professional concerns of the Seybold crowd. We're talking about Steve's announcement that there have been over 140,000 iBook preorders since the consumer portable was first unveiled in July. Sure, the graphics geeks in the crowd were drooling over the Photoshop performance of Apple's latest pro Mac, but we couldn't help repeating that number in our heads. 140,000. It's right there in black in white in an Apple press release, in case you missed the keynote. That's a lot of iBooks.

In fact, if you're the visualizing type, a stack of 140,000 iBooks would be over four and a half miles high. For the financially oriented, if you break that down into dollars, at $1599 a pop, we're talking about $223,860,000. Pretty good for a computer that won't be shipping for at least another couple of weeks yet. It's even more impressive when you break the numbers down into a daily average, as the Mac Observer did: that's over three thousand iBook advance orders every single day since the product was first introduced. And John Dvorak would have you believe that there isn't a "real man" among them.

Come to think of it, we can't refute John's claim with anecdotal evidence; the only iBook preorder we know about in a personal sense involves a female family member who put down a deposit at CompUSA last week without ever having seen an iBook live. In fact, the only exposure she's had to the iBook at all is a quick glimpse at a brochure we brought back from Macworld Expo. Currently she uses Windows both at home and at work, and to the best of our knowledge, she's never even seen the Mac OS in use, let alone sat down and used a Mac-- and yet she was willing to fork over a couple of hundred dollars to reserve an iBook. If that's any indication of the iBook's future popularity, then Apple's biggest problem will be building them fast enough. In fact, perhaps we should all pray that Dvorak was right-- imagine how much back-order trouble Apple will be in if the "real men" start buying them, too.