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Cringing in the Corner (8/7/98)
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One of the pundits who claims to have actual numbers on how many iMacs Apple has been able to produce thus far is Robert Cringely, self-appointed martyr to the flaming email arrows of many a Mac EvangeLista. In his latest column, he reveals that Apple hopes to have 30,000 iMacs in stores by next Saturday's launch date, but that as of last week, they had only been able to produce about 5000 of the little buggers. Worse yet, he claims that a random sampling of the machines so far produced revealed a whopping 11% out-of-box failure rate. Holy Lemon, Batman! Is Apple so determined to compete with the "big boys" of the PC world that they're now attempting to adopt their traditional failure rates, too?
Now, we have no idea if Cringely's information is true or not, but he certainly doesn't know any less about Apple's iMac production than we do. We just find it a little hard to believe that Apple is capable of producing anything with an 11% failure rate. Still, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that Apple was still ironing out some fairly serious bugs in its iMac production process. Let's just hope they figured out what was causing the quality problem and fixed it early last week, giving them a chance to roll out a quality product in time for the scheduled introduction...
...Or else we can all prepare for plenty of press reminiscent of the old days. There's an awful lot riding on a successful iMac rollout. AtAT is keeping its collective fingers crossed.
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SceneLink (918)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/7/98 episode: August 7, 1998: The masses have spoken-- while Apple hoped to sell 400,000 iMacs this quarter, they have already received 350,000 pre-orders for a machine that won't even be out for another week. Meanwhile, Apple kicks into high gear to minimize the inevitable iMac drought caused by record demand, and Robert Cringely claims that not only is Apple having trouble building the systems quickly enough, they're also experiencing some pretty serious quality problems, to boot...
Other scenes from that episode: 916: T-minus Seven Days (8/7/98) There's only one week left before the iMac is officially released, and we'll all finally see if the demand lives up to the hype. Rumors about rampant pre-orders continue to fly, fueling the frenzied anticipation of what has the potential to be one of the best-selling computers in the history of the industry... 917: iMac Drought (8/7/98) Apparently, resellers are resigned to their fate: they seem to be accepting the cold, hard fact that there's no way Apple can provide as many iMacs as they've been asked for. A Computer Retail Week article claims that several resellers are changing their "iMac Day" plans based on the "certainty" that they won't get as many iMacs as they ordered...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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