Apple Computer Corp said yesterday it’s put aside a staggering $100m to market its new consumer desktop, the iMac, in what amounts to the company’s largest ever marketing campaign. The iMac, Apple’s much-hyped translucent all-in-one desktop, goes on sale tomorrow, August 15, although the company boasts its already received over 150,000 advance orders for the system. Meanwhile, it says it’s been busy gearing itself up for a marketing extravaganza with high-profile ad campaigns lined up for TV, radio, magazines and billboards. Apple’s pitching the iMac as the computer that lets anyone even your granny, get onto the internet. One financial analyst, with Gerard Klauer Mattison & Co, said the marketing campaign made perfect sense, especially if you consider the 5 to 10 million consumers (all of whom want internet access) he estimates are poised to buy a personal computer. Apple’s TV ad campaign begins Sunday, a new 12-page Mac insert (in magazines like Time and Newsweek) starts this week, iMac-clad billboards will cover cities all over America and a nationwide radio promotion, featuring five iMac giveaways every day till the launch, is already underway. Amid the hype, the company also announced two new minitower versions of its G3 business desktops. The new systems will be available with a 300MHz or 333MHz chip. The 300MHz system comes with 64 megabytes of Ram, upgradeable to 768Mb, an 8 Gigabyte hard drive, 1Mb of Level 2 cache, a 24X CD-ROM drive, 6Mb of internal video synchronous graphics RAM and a 100-Mb Iomega Zip drive for $2,400. Apple said a similarly-configured version, running at 333MHz, is expected to be priced at $3,000.
