It was a big day for Apple's public image, to be sure; following the release of some good news, Apple's stock went through the roof, relatively speaking. It actually broke 41 in heavy trading, before finally settling back down to about 39. That's the highest it's been in at least three years, and over three times higher than it was at the end of last year. The "good news" was presumably Apple's "official" number of iMac pre-orders, made public in a press release: Apple started accepting orders for the new consumer system on August 3rd, and one week later had racked up a whopping 150,000 of them-- a new record for first-week sales of any Apple product. Tom Jacobs, the CEO of Computer Town, describes the rush of pre-orders as a "frenzy in the consumer market" unmatched in his 20 years in computer retail.

Of course, it may not have been just the pre-orders that drove the stock price up... Apple also announced that over 460 Mac applications have been announced since the iMac was first unveiled back in early May. Those software packages, coupled with the 35 new hardware products announced to take advantage of the iMac's USB and Ethernet interfaces, may have done a lot in convincing Wall Street that the Mac platform won't just be sticking around-- it may actually start growing again, and by the end of the year, as Apple had stated.

As for our take on the whole thing, well, we at AtAT believe that one of the biggest factors driving up Apple's stock price is the page on Apple's web site describing how iMacs are being produced twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week at the Elk Grove manufacturing facility. And it's not necessarily even the information itself-- which has been pretty much common knowledge for the last week or so-- but the photos on the page which are the key. Those photos depict dozens of iMacs on the assembly line and in their shrink-wrapped boxes ready to ship to dealers. There's just something about seeing a herd of iMacs all huddled together that makes you believe that they really are coming this Saturday and the iMac is not just a really elaborate media hoax.