Is it just us, or has Apple really lost some steam since last year? 1999 brought us a ridiculous number of new Apple products. There were three revisions to the iMac, including a couple of speed-bumps, the introduction of fruit flavors, and even the refinement of those flavors when the whole system was redesigned from scratch. The Power Mac gained a Graphite makeover and G4 status, and received one further update with the move to all-AGP models and faster graphics. (You could count the clock speed downgrade as a revision, too, if you're really twisted.) The PowerBook shed some weight while gaining faster processors, USB, a translucent keyboard, and a bitchin' glowing logo. And the long-awaited iBook was introduced, finally filling the empty fourth quadrant of Apple's Wacky Cartesian Product Grid. It was truly an embarrassment of riches.

But now we're 42% through 2000, and what have we seen? A new PowerBook that's got some nice improvements under the hood, but looks just like the old PowerBook, with the exception of a couple of FireWire ports. A revision B iBook that's identical except for some more RAM and a bigger hard disk-- unless you go for the Graphite model, which also has 66 MHz tacked onto its clock speed. Nothing new on the Power Mac front. And, perhaps, most importantly, not a single improvement to the iMac. Yes, the translucent space egg was once the quick-change artist of the industry, getting new colors or bigger hard disks or processor bumps more often than Regis appears on TV-- but now it's been eight months since the last update, and frankly, the fans are getting bored.

In fact, if you've been staring in horror as Apple's stock plummets earthward, you can blame it in part on sagging iMac sales. According to MacNN, there's a reason you haven't been hearing about the iMac's placement in the PC Data sales charts for the last several months, and it ain't modesty. Apparently Apple Money Dude Fred Anderson has been telling analysts that iMac sales have been "steadily dropping off since April," and we can only hope that the mucky-mucks at Apple aren't just scratching their heads wondering why.

See, plenty of people got burned by purchasing Bondi Blue iMacs for Christmas of 1998, only to watch Apple bump up the speed, introduce a choice of colors, and cut the price by $100 a couple of weeks later. The way we see it, it's not rumors of new iMacs that are hurting sales-- it's the expectation of a short iMac refresh cycle that Apple itself gave to consumers. There must be plenty of prospective iMac buyers holding off on making their purchases saying, "Eight months? There has got to be a new iMac just around the corner." Stir that in with the average consumer's unyielding hunger for newness, and you've got a recipe for a nice little sales drought. And if the current rumors are correct and we won't see a new iMac until July, well, we can only expect iMac sales to get worse before they get better. That is, unless these worrisome sales figures prompt Apple to ship a new iMac sooner...