Say, remember how, when flat-panel iMacs were tougher to find than power ties at a biker bar, the hottest trend in the Mac community involved guessing just what sort of problems must have led to Apple's massive production shortfalls? Our personal favorite was Merrill Lynch's oh-so-responsible insistence that production was being held up because of a "radiation problem," a suggestion just zany enough to have inspired us to form our own groundless opinion that the Taiwanese manufacturing plants where the iMacs are built were clearly being overrun by belligerent and snap-happy drunken Smurfs armed with wet towels and bad attitudes. ("I can't run the line anymore, boss-- this welt really stings!") Well, it's been nearly a week since Steve Jobs announced that the drought was over and iMacs had entered volume production-- and people are still trying to guess what caused the delay.

Take, for example, MacUser, who claims to have unearthed the real reasons why Apple spent a couple of months producing fewer iMacs than it would have if artisans had been individually carving each one from a block of raw soapstone with their tongues. According to MacUser, the oft-rumored iMac firmware problem is real, and allegedly confirmed by internal Knowledge Base articles accessible only by Apple support personnel; it's apparently something to do with a compatibility issue between the SuperDrive and the iMac's hard drive. iMacs produced since the problem was discovered and fixed are, of course, A-okay, and it seems that unless your high-end iMac is screwed up enough to require service, you don't need the firmware update. It's hard to gauge, of course, since Apple appears to be keeping this issue under wraps for PR reasons.

Of course, something like a firmware issue wouldn't really cause production problems, though it may well have thrown a wrench into the distribution side of things. We can see some poor guy getting stuck with the job of applying a firmware update to every single SuperDrive iMac in the warehouse; beats cleaning toilets, but not by much. On the production side, MacUser claims that "problems with the construction of the arm that connects the iMac's screen to its base" (more technically known as "that silver bendy thing") led to a drastic slowdown until Apple started "building the arm units [i.e. "bendy things"] separately from the main production line." Man, we just knew that bendy thing would be trouble.

Whatever the problems, though, by all accounts, Apple has conquered them, and very soon resellers will be awash in a sea of LCD iMacs just waiting to be adopted by happy homes. The bottom line is that whatever plagued Apple's iMac production has apparently been fixed, iMacs will soon be plentiful, and we may never really know just what caused the Great iMac Drought of 2002. But if you buy a new iMac and find an empty can of Extra-Strength Smurf-Away rattling around in the box, you'll probably have a pretty good idea of what really happened.