Breaking the Color Barrier

Here's some new colors for you: Strawberry, Lime, Blueberry, Tangerine and Grape (which the fruit-impaired might also recognize as red, green, blue, orange, and purple). Those are the shades the iMac will now come in--part of Apple's push to make the marketing of the personal computer less a matter of megahertz and more of design. To sweeten the pie, the company is cutting the price by a hundred bucks, and, in a bow to today's instant nostalgia, selling the remaining first-edition iMacs (you remember, with that Bondi blue case that's SO five minutes ago) for a svelte $1,049.

Here's another color for you: Red, as in ink, which is what Apple had been spilling in the years before interim CEO/messiah Steve Jobs returned to the orchard. Now he has a bumper crop: Apple announced it has sold more than 800,000 iMacs in the computer's first five months. The company will now turn a profit for the 5th straight quarter, and the stock price, which was languishing at around $12 a share when Jobs came back, closed at a robust 43 Tuesday. Healthy enough so that the next color might very well be pink.