And thus is any remaining pretense tossed straight out the window. Steve's claim that Apple had decided "not to use the iPod to drive people to Macs" is looking thinner and thinner, isn't it? The way Apple tells it, you'd think it was surprised at reports of a "halo effect" boosting Mac sales among the iPod-using population, as if this were a totally unplanned consequence of selling the world's hottest portable music player to Wintel users. Barely a week ago we heard reports from campus computer resellers that students were opting for iBooks and PowerBooks in vastly increased proportions due largely to their love affair with the other little chunk of portable Apple hardware they'd all used, and now Apple seems to have abandoned any remaining subtlety with its design and marketing tactics for the new iMac G5.

Yes, speaking of things looking thinner and thinner, the two-inch-thin iMac G5 was indeed unveiled at the Paris Philnote this morning, as faithful viewer Small Paul kindly informed us, and the most noteworthy aspect of its minimalist industrial design is shamelessly called out on Apple's home page: from the side, the family resemblance to an iPod in a dock is striking, and we'd be surprised if Jon Ive's directive wasn't to "make it look like the iPod's big brother." (Frankly, we're a little surprised Apple didn't give it a silver back.) Indeed, Apple is hawking the thing with the phrase "From the creators of iPod," and if that isn't an overt invitation for Wintel users in love with their iPods to consider making the switch, we don't know what is. C'mon, even the sound byte Philism in Apple's press release targets iPod owners: "Just like the iPod redefined portable digital music players, the new iMac G5 redefines what users expect from a consumer desktop."

So all of this is clearly to get the iPod-enamored Wintellians to take a look, and when they do, we think there's a good chance they'll like what they see. Somehow Apple managed to cram a whole heckuva lotta computer into just two inches of depth; compare the photos of the new iMac with similar photos of Apple's latest displays to see just how compact the actual iMac guts must be. And yet in that teensy amount of space, Apple somehow squoze in a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz G5, an 80 or 160 GB hard drive, a slot-loading combo drive or Superdrive, a reasonably decent 64 MB AGP 8X NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics subsystem, and a full complement of ports. Even the power supply is built in-- no brick on the floor, which for which feature alone the iMac G5 deserves to win a few dozen awards.

Granted, anyone expecting these new iMacs to deliver full-on Power Mac G5 performance is sure to be disappointed; the frontside bus is "only" 533 or 600 MHz, the RAM maxes out at "only" 2 GB, and the FireWire ports are "only" the 400 Mbps flavor. As usual, there's no speed listed for the slot-loading combo drive or Superdrive, but since the drives are mounted vertically, they might be a bit slower than the state of the art. And even the top-of-the-line iMac only comes with 256 MB of RAM standard, which is practically a crime-- but with prices ranging from just $1299 to $1899, we doubt anyone will have much right to complain. We can't say for sure until the benchmarks are in, but G5 power built into some gorgeous displays for well under two grand just might turn out to be the best bang for the buck Apple has ever delivered. Think of it this way: the 20-incher costs only $600 more than the 20-inch display does, and you get a full-on G5 Mac that takes up literally zero extra space.

We'll have to wait until they ship in "mid-September" to get the real low-down, but so far we're not finding much to complain about. The blank space beneath the LCD is a little offputting, perhaps, but that's where the stickers go. We expect some people are going to dislike the new iMac's form factor (which at best is decidedly less iconic and distinctive than the previous two designs, and at worst looks like an eMac that got caught in a hydraulic press), but from our perspective it's simplest to think that there really isn't any form factor to dislike in the first place: it's an Apple display with an invisible G5 mysteriously attached. (Ooooo, spooky.)