As you're all well aware, Macworld Expo keynotes are rife with long-standing tradition. Certain aspects of Steve Jobs's dog-and-pony show are so predictable, people freak out when he breaks from routine; plenty of Apple-watchers are still trying to scrape their jaws off the floor after the man ditched the whole black turtleneck thing and appeared on stage last week in a suit and tie. And that wasn't the only departure from the status quo that had Apple fans reeling in the aisles; where was Steve's patented "one more thing..." announcement? Black is white, up is down, cats and dogs are living together!

Still, at least one time-honored tradition managed to survive in Steve's latest fireside chat: whenever the man introduces new hardware, it's become customary for him to give the audience the first public glimpse of Apple's new TV commercials, and last week was no exception. The assembled faithful in the Makuhari Messe Event Hall got to evaluate five, count 'em, five new iMac ads on the big screen-- whereas the rest of us had to settle for the video-on-demand webcast version that was finally posted a couple of days later. Needless to say, the chintzy sound and smeary, teensy image size of the archived webcast didn't exactly make for ideal conditions for the appreciation of Apple's latest marketing push-- plus we, uh, can't read Japanese. Obviously the new ads center around the trippy iTunes visuals and how well they match the controversial new "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian" iMacs, but we didn't feel we could form an opinion on them one way or the other until we saw them more clearly.

Thankfully, as faithful viewer David Triska noted a couple of days ago, Apple has now posted high-quality QuickTime versions of all five ads to its site, so now you can experience them as they were meant to be seen and heard. (Well, almost-- we haven't yet seen any of these commercials on broadcast TV, which will be the real test.) Each one drenches the viewer in a particular type of music as the screen is filled with iTunes's psychedelic visuals, some simple words appear to point out that iMacs can burn audio CDs, play MP3s, etc.; the camera pulls out to show the visuals dancing around on a Flower Power or Blue Dalmatian iMac, which does a happy little catwalk spin to show off its spiffy new threads, and then it's back to the visuals close-up, the Apple logo, and then blackness. Load up all five and bathe yourself in Apple's minimalist thirty-second message: when it comes to digital music, iMacs rock.

Those of you who feel that the practice of using Jeff Goldblum to narrate Apple's commercials is one tradition that should be relegated to the dustbin of history, well, you'll be happy to hear that Apple's new iMac ads are voiceover-free-- there's no extraneous sound to mess with the integrity of the music. And if you're in the "Flower Power Must Die" camp after having seen only the pictures posted to Apple's site, you really owe it to yourself to check out how the new patterns look in the commercials; neither "Flower Power" nor "Blue Dalmatian" is as garish as the web images imply. Just take a look at this side-by-side comparison. We admit it-- judging by the commercial footage, the real new patterns aren't half bad. That doesn't mean we'll be sticking a Flower Power iMac in the den anytime soon, but we're not spending all our time wondering just when Steve lost his mind, either. Hey, the man approved the use of "The Radio Still Sucks" by The Ataris, so we're willing to give his sanity the benefit of the doubt for now.