It's a whole new year. (Yes, we know, "Nobody likes a math geek, Scully," but it's not a new millennium-- in fact, it's not a new century or even a new decade. We'll shut up now.) So is it time for a whole new set of colors to gain popularity? No, we're not advocating that Apple replace its current selection of fruit flavors with something else-- we're wondering if maybe the buying public is going to develop some broader tastes within the current Fabulous iMac Color Wheel. We'll leave Graphite out of this for the time being, since the Graphite iMac is in a class by itself. The standard iMac DV comes in your choice of Blueberry, Grape, Lime, Tangerine, or Strawberry. So how come so many of you are picking Blueberry?

It's not that we don't like Blueberry-- our iBook is Blueberry, and it's quite nice. But we wanted Tangerine, because frankly, Blueberry's a little bland. And in the case of the iMac when there's also the choice of three other colors, we're still sort of surprised that Blueberry remains the most popular color, far and away; according to a San Jose Mercury News article, Blueberry iMacs are selling as well as "the other four colors combined." Originally we were wondering whether that was just due to stores stocking more Blueberry iMacs than other flavors... we're not sure if Apple is still shipping iMacs that way, but we're pretty sure they were at one time. And we've heard from multiple sources that several (if not all) CompUSA stores only ordered Blueberry iBooks, assuming that Tangerine would be unpopular. Way to skew those popularity numbers, guys.

But a few of us being forced to accept Blueberry when we really wanted one of the "less popular" colors can't negate the fact that, apparently, Blueberry and Grape are in such high demand that some retailers are actually giving away free RAM to customers willing to "settle" for Tangerine, Lime, or Strawberry instead. Hmmm. So much for The Gap's attempts to make orange "the new black." But it's a whole new year, now, and maybe, just maybe, Lime will be all the rage. Meanwhile, we're seriously wondering if perhaps Apple's going to rethink its whole "your choice of colors" strategy and just ship everything in Graphite, since that shade seems so overwhelmingly popular with everyone. Bye-bye inventory stocking issues, hello big sales. Hey, it's not impossible.