As the Apple Turns: Scene 4936: What, Only Of The WEEK? (9/22/04)

What, Only Of The WEEK? (9/22/04)

Still staggered by the nifty five-out-of-five rating handed down by the decidedly un-Mac-centric PC Magazine? Well, hold onto your earflaps, fellow windwalkers, because the press kudos just keep on keepin' on-- and they're getting even more mainstream. Case in point: the iMac G5's latest achievement in extracting dripping gobbets of praise from the pundits is to have snagged TIME Magazine's coveted "Gadget of the Week" award. At least, we assume it's coveted; we're not really big TIME readers, so we're just making an educated guess, here. Heck, we'd covet it, anyway.

If, uh, we were a gadget of some kind.

Look, let's just take it as read that the iMac G5 being named "Gadget of the Week" is a delightful and positive experience and move on to the review that won it that title in the first place, because another volley of warm fuzzies for an Apple product is always welcome to those of us card-carrying members of the 2.x% Market Share Club. The obligatory list of laudatory phrases doesn't really apply, here, because this reviewer is a little more reserved than some; the only two that really stand out are "super suave" and "a scene of Kubrickian merits" (the latter of which pretty much says it all).

There's the obligatory acclaim for the iMac's design, of course, with the "brilliant widescreen LCD" coming together with the "brushed metal L-shaped stand" and the "familiar white sheen" to form a tableau of "sci-fi harmony." The computing power is described as "nice," which seems understated, but a net positive. There's a sort of awe when he discusses the new FireWire Target Disk upgrade script, which is as it should be, since that thing rocks harder than Skynyrd. And overall the author's happy that Apple is "inventing actual reasons for people to switch from Windows to Mac," which he prefers to the company "spending money on its silly 'Switch' campaign." What the--? "Silly"?! Of all the... Feiss! Cohick! Attack, my pretties, ATTACK!!

What's so neat about the new iMac is that you can practically feel most reviewers struggling to criticize it for being too expensive ("it is a Mac, after all, smug snigger, condescending chuckle"), but finding that they kindasorta can't. While the TIME reviewer doesn't seem to have any such axe to grind, he does emphasize that the iMac G5 isn't "cheap," but then concedes that it's "a pretty good deal" as a "'desktop replacement' replacement." Meaning, you'll pay loads less for an iMac than for a super-souped-up giganto-screen laptop that you're only going to lug from Stationary Point A to Stationary Point B and then plug into a wall socket anyway, so people shopping for such notebooks should just "save some money and put the rest into the iMac G5." (It's praise. Trust us.)

So yeah, it's all good. This is by no means the first time an Apple product has been named "Gadget of the Week" (it's apparently happened five or six times in the past couple of years-- Apple is on a roll), but with the holiday shopping season bearing down upon us like a big, black heavy thing on wheels, the more mainstream positive press the iMac gets, the fatter Apple's cash registers will become when people are proxy-shopping for Santa. Why do we get the feeling that there will be a lot of these things under the collective tree this year?

SceneLink (4936)

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The above scene was taken from the 9/22/04 episode:

September 22, 2004: The iMac G5 continues to enthrall the press, as TIME declares it the "Gadget of the Week." Meanwhile, word has it that Apple only makes four measly cents per iTunes Music Store song sold, and Sony decides that maybe putting MP3 compatibility into its digital music players wouldn't be such a terrible idea after all...

Other scenes from that episode:

4937: Don't Spend It All At Once (9/22/04) Sure, we've all heard that Apple's iTunes Music Store only barely breaks even, and even if we were all living in the Land of Cotton Candy Trees and Rainbow Ponies and Apple were miraculously making a full dollar's worth of pure profit on every 99-cent song sold, that'd still "only" be maybe $35 million in profit this quarter, which isn't necessarily a lot in the grand scheme of Apple's usual revenues...
4938: Anatomy Of A Design Change (9/22/04) Ladies and gentlemen, we here at AtAT are thrilled beyond pants to announce that our brilliant and unprecedented method of eavesdropping undetectably on high-level corporate strategy meetings (we can't go into details until the patent comes through, but suffice it to say that the key to the whole thing was equipping the dwarf with a firm-bristled toothbrush) is a success of formerly unimagined proportions...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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