iMac fever continues, or so the story goes. We've been hearing all kinds of reports of rampant preorders and like hysteria. It all started with the apocryphal story of CompUSA's 70,000 iMac preorders several weeks ago, which we now assume must be preorders by CompUSA stores (and not customers), given that the SKU for the iMac only showed up in CompUSA's system for customer preorders last week. Now, most recently, a Toronto Star article mentions more evidence that the iMac has the potential to steal the show this summer.

According to the Star, a ten-store chain in Northern California called ComputerWare has booked nearly 200 customer pre-orders for the first iMacs to hit the channel. And the five-store ComputerTown chain has logged "hundreds" of preorders as well. Those numbers are much more realistic to our ears than 70,000 preorders at CompUSA; even scaling for number of stores, we couldn't expect more than a few thousand CompUSA customer preorders at the most. Still, that's nothing to sneeze at, considering the iMac is still over a month away, and advertising hasn't yet begun in earnest.

The neat thing about all this early interest is that it should help Apple avoid the slump that analysts expect will hit most computer manufacturers this summer. In fact, Apple expects to ship up to 400,000 iMacs by the end of September (though how many of those actually get sold to end-users is anyomne's guess). That's a whole lotta iMacs. We only hope that Apple isn't reversing the polarity of its blunder with the PowerBook G3 Series. With the PowerBooks, demand was way, way higher than supply. Now that Apple's creating a vast supply of iMacs, let's all hope that they aren't overestimating the demand.