It's official; the CompUSA promotion for iMac preorders has begun. Regular viewers will recall a recent episode in which we discussed CompUSA's announcement that, for a $250 minimum deposit, CompUSA customers could reserve an iMac for release on August 15th, and receive a booklet stuffed with $800 worth of coupon-y goodness. Unfortunately, at the time, CompUSA made no mention of specifically on which products iMac customers could expect to save money; they were simply described as "peripherals and software." But now that the promotion is underway and the coupon books have arrived, a MacInTouch reader fills us all in on the list of price-reduced products.

But here's the weirdness: a quick glance at the list of offers reveals that a sizeable number of the coupons are for reduced prices and rebates on hardware that's not even iMac-compatible: SCSI Syquest drives, instead of the translucent red USB SparQ. External SCSI CD-ROM drives, when the iMac has a 24x drive built in. RAM upgrades-- for non-iMac G3 desktops only. Internal Zip drives for PowerBooks (!) instead of the translucent blue USB model suitable for the iMac. There are even joysticks and gamepads-- exactly the right kind of product to include in a promotion for a consumer machine like the iMac-- that are ADB-based, and therefore not iMac compatible. And how about the final kick in the head? $5 off a 50-pack of Mac-formatted floppy disks. Now that's real useful for an iMac.

We at AtAT, who definitely plan to add an iMac to the office, were originally considering placing a CompUSA preorder in the hopes of receiving coupons offering discounts on a USB Zip drive, or better yet, the USB Imation Superdisk. But instead of including coupons for useful equipment like that, CompUSA's seen fit to include rebates for SCSI-based drives and ADB peripherals. Not a very iMac-centric promotion, is it? We mean, obviously this coupon book was designed to be used for promotions on standard Power Macs and PowerBooks as well, but after the CompUSA press release, we really expected to see discounts on real iMac hardware. We're sorry to say, this seems like another shining example of CompUSA's typically half-assed way of doing things. (And if this coupon booklet came out of Cupertino, instead, then we're a little concerned about Apple's lack of focus.)