Man, if it's not one thing, it's another. (Oooh, that's deep.) You will recall, of course, that whole dust-up with iMac availability last quarter, when demand was through the roof, pre-orders were stacked up like pink slips at Motorola, and LCD iMacs were harder to come by than a cufflink at a nudist colony. As the months marched on, Apple managed to increase production through the judicious application of illicit stimulants and threats of torture on the factory floor, but the company still closed out the quarter with a significant number of backorders to fill. It was a pretty familiar tune to Apple: plenty of demand, not enough supply.

So what's the problem now? Well, the good news is that Apple has gotten all the iMac production issues ironed out and units are rolling off the lines and onto shelves smooth as butter. The bad news is that no one's actually looking to buy them anymore-- or, at least, that's what some Wall Street analysts are saying. According to a CNET article, now that supply is strong, demand is petering out; analysts from both Morgan Stanley and Salomon Smith Barney are less than beamingly optimistic about the number of iMacs Apple will be able to sell this quarter, and estimate that the company won't actually move many more than it did during last quarter's Great iMac Drought-- despite the estimated one to 1.3 months' worth of product in the channel.

Now, assuming that this massive deflation of demand is real and not just the tortured imaginings of a couple of Wall Street analysts driven to distraction by playing too much Windows Solitaire, what caused it? Was it the $100 price hike that Apple slapped on when RAM and LCD component prices started to rise? Was it the ever-growing need for instant gratification, which led potential iMac buyers to go out and grab a Compaq instead when they saw the waiting lists last quarter? Or maybe it was just the infinitesimal and constantly shrinking attention span of the American public, who saw the iMac in Time Magazine in January, lusted after it, and then promptly forgot all about it by the time the systems were actually available for purchase. Timing is everything, after all.

Whatever. We won't know for sure whether iMac demand is tapering off or not until next month's quarterly earnings report, but since there's still three weeks left in this fiscal quarter, consider this a friendly reminder: remember that keen new iMac with the positionable LCD display, the zippy G4 processor, and enough Wow Factor to make your neighbors trip over their tongues in jealousy? Remember how you really, really wanted one? Well, you can actually buy them now-- in multiple configurations, even. So giddyup.