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It's a...desk lamp!
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January 7, 2002: 6:35 p.m. ET
Steve Jobs delights the faithful with a strange-looking new iMac. But it's harder to get excited about Apple's stock.
By David Futrelle
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NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - There's a great scene in the movie Men in Black in which Will Smith is called on to assist in an alien birth. It's not an easy delivery, but Smith ultimately presents the new parents with a slimy, bouncing baby alien, complete with its own baby tentacles. Tommy Lee Jones -- Smith's partner -- pats the new father on the back. "Congratulations," he says. "It's a ... squid."
That's sort of how I felt Monday morning when Apple Computer's Steve Jobs unveiled the long-awaited edition of the trademark iMac. Congratulations, I thought, It's a...desk lamp.
Of course, Apple's new "desk lamp" is pretty much the coolest desk lamp the world has ever seen. Watching Jobs demo the machine on television I found myself practically drooling. (I wasn't the only one -- see what other Mac-o-philes had to say).
Thinking outside the box, and moving way beyond the company's original all-in-one iMac design, Apple has hidden the guts of its new computer system in a base about the size and shape of a honeydew melon half. Above the base, attached with an adjustable neck, is a 14-inch flat-panel display that seems to float.
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Apple's new iMac. | |
The editors of Time magazine, apparently no more able than I am to resist Steve Jobs' considerable charms, have put the new machine on the cover of the magazine's latest issue (See "Apple's new core").
Time's cover story -- a testament to the power of Apple's hype factory, actually hit some newsstands (and the Web) many hours before Jobs officially unveiled the machine Monday morning at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. (If Time's lavishly illustrated cover story isn't enough, Apple's own Web site offers up Quicktime movies and "virtual tours" of the new iMac in motion.
The level of hype surrounding the launch of the new iMac is impressive, even by Apple standards. While Steve Jobs was sitting down with Time's Josh Quittner, Apple's Web site was whipping the faithful into a frenzy with teasers promising big things from this week's Macworld expo. "Count on being blown away" read one teaser. The hype has its desired effect on some investors, who bid up the stock in recent days. (True to form, the stock sagged somewhat as Macworld got underway on Monday, a classic illustration of the old saw about buying on the rumors, selling on the news.)
The real question, of course, is whether the new iMac will "blow away" anyone but the Mac faithful -- that is, whether the new iMac will prove to be a crowd-pleasing, customer-base-expanding hit like the original iMac, or merely an elegant flop, like Apple's ill-fated cube.
True, there is a lot going for the new iMac besides its elegant design. Unlike the cube, it isn't prohibitively expensive -- low-end models go for roughly $1,300. And it's designed to work simply and easily as a sort of "hub" for a widening array of digital devices, from digital cameras and video recorders to MP3 players like Apple's recently introduced iPod.
At this point, though, with the PC market still moribund, and Apple's stock up nearly 60 percent from its late October lows, it's a heck of a lot easier to get excited about Apple's new iMac than it is to get excited about the company's stock. The new iMac will have to be quite a big hit indeed to live up to its advance billing.
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