Retailers see red over iMac colours
MacWorld round-up Apple starts 1999 under cloud of supply issue.
Mac retailers and peripherals vendors have warned that the introduction of coloured iMacs will result in serious inventory problems for the channel.
Apple partners were caught unaware by the unveiling of the five additional colours to the standard iMac Bondi blue - blueberry, grape, tangerine, lime and strawberry - by Steve Jobs, interim chief executive of Apple, at the MacWorld show in San Francisco last week, as it had remained a closely guarded secret.
James Giarusso, president of peripherals maker VST Technologies, said: 'This is the first we have heard about the colours.
'It presents a huge inventory problem,' he added, warning that distributors and dealers will have to stock all the colours at the risk that some will prove unpopular, while others will sell out too fast.
VST made external disk drives for the iMac which matched the machine's original colour. Giarusso said it will have to manufacture the same drive in all six shades, unless it finds a way around the problem.
Possible solutions could be to wait for the market to decide which iMac colours will catch on and manufacture only the most popular ones; to make one single, colourless device and add colour by attaching a cover; or insert a coloured light bulb into the machines.
'From an inventory point of view, the colours could be an issue,' agreed Norbert Pestana, purchasing manager of retailer Computer Town. 'But we sell so many iMacs that it's not really a problem.'
He was unable to confirm whether the company would be stocking all the colour options of lesser selling add-ons. 'Peripheral vendors will have to come up with a solution,' Pestana said.
According to Jobs, Apple spent between six and nine months researching plastics chemistry to arrive at the correct shades and finish for the colours. 'Colour is a big deal to customers,' he argued, claiming it was more important to many consumers than the amount of Ram or the size of the hard drive.
Most vendors remained optimistic that they would find a way around the problem. 'We've got to figure out a way,' said Giarusso. 'We're sure that, in the end, we're going to sell more systems because of these colours.'
In his keynote speech at MacWorld, Jobs outlined Apple's successes in the past 12 months. He claimed 800,000 iMacs had been shipped since the launch in August 1998 and that 32 per cent of iMac buyers were first-time computer buyers, while a further 13 per cent were converts from Wintel.
Jobs added that more than 1,300 additional or updated Mac applications had been introduced since May last year.
He unveiled a range of professional desktops to replace the Power Macintosh G3, which include faster G3 processors (up to 400MHz) and a built-in 3D graphics card.
The machines, priced from $1,599 to $2,999, also offer a faster bus speed of 100MHz; expandability to 1Gb of Ram; up to 100Gb of internal disk storage; four expansion slots with standard 100Mbit Ethernet.
The minitower G3s will come with a built-in ATI Rage128 graphics accelerator with 16Mb of memory. They dispense with the Mac's traditional SCSI interface, replacing it with universal serial bus (USB) and Firewire ports.
Jobs defended this controversial decision by claiming 'history has passed by' SCSI and that a SCSI add-on card is available for $49. The Firewire bus allows peripherals such as video cameras to be connected at speeds of up to 400Mbps.
As well as the additional colour range, Jobs unveiled a line of iMacs, priced $100 below the original at $1,199, which include a faster 266MHz G3 processor and larger 6Gb hard drive.
He also announced a server operating system, the Mac OS X Server. The OS, formerly named Rhapsody, is a precursor to Apple's next generation desktop operating system, Mac OS X, which Jobs said will ship 'in less than a year'.
Mac OS X Server, based on the Mach microkernel, will ship in February with an Apache Web server and Apple's WebObjects development environment.
It will be priced #995 per server for a limited number of clients. A G3 PowerMac with Mac OS X Server will cost $4,999.
Jobs added that 12 computer games manufacturers would be crossing to the Mac and demonstrated software manufactured by Connectix that allows G3-based Macs to use Sony PlayStation games.
Apple's partnership with Microsoft continued with the announcement of the immediate availability of IE 4.5 and Outlook Express 4.5 for the Mac.