Hey, remember last week when Robert Cringely claimed to have inside information on the iMac's production run that was less than complimentary? He had said that as of the week before, Apple had only managed to crank out 5,000 iMacs. And worse yet, in a random sampling taken from the production run, Cringely said that Apple had found an 11% out-of-box failure rate. With numbers like that, the chances of a successful iMac launch looked pretty dismal.

Yet we were buoyed by the fact that no one else seemed to be reporting the numbers that Cringely had. It's not easy to suppress information like a staggering 11% failure rate, so why was Cringely the only person talking about it? Well, according to Apple Recon, there's a simple answer: it's not true. They describe Cringely's "5000 iMacs" figure as "way off," according to their own sources. And the 11% failure rate is apparently old news, back from Apple's first pre-production demo run, which makes sense-- remember the reports that 83 iMacs were shipped from Laguna West to New York for the MacWorld Expo? Sounds like they actually tried building an initial run of 100 units, and 11 of them failed. Of the remaining 89, Apple culled five or six from the batch for local demos and sent the rest to the Expo. Plausible, no?

When we have to make a judgement call on whose information is right, Cringely's or Recon's, we've gotta go with Recon. They may be arrogant, they may be cryptic, they may spend a good 70% of their time telling everyone how right they were when they made an off-the-cuff prediction back in '96, but pound for pound, they often come up with the goods. So we thank Apple Recon for easing some of the concerns raised in our minds regarding Apple's ability to build iMacs fast enough to get to the stores-- and well enough that they work when you pull them out of the box.