She comes in colors ...Local Apple dealers singing iMac's praises Apple goes after the home computing market in a big way with its new product

Local Apple sales and service representatives are delighted with sales of the iMac, as well as the new G3.

Chris Carroll, Apple specialist with Database Systems, said Database's sales of the iMac have been "incredible." Since the iMac came on the market in mid August, "We've sold well over 500."

Ron Green, Apple service manager for ComputerLand, agreed that the iMac has been a great product for Apple, ranking as the nation's hottest selling personal computer in the last quarter.

With the iMac, Apple is going after home computer users in a big way. "Apple is not trying to go in and take over accounting" or other general business applications, Green said. With the iMac it is targeting home users of Internet and multimedia applications. With the G3 it is targeting the professional user of graphics, multimedia and desktop publishing programs.

That is where Macs excel, he said, and local businesses are aware of that fact. For example, the Assemblies of God, a ComputerLand client, uses 300 Macs in its publishing operation but the business end is all PCs, he said.

Likewise, Bass Pro has "a ton of PCs for the business end, but the desktop art and publishing equipment is Mac."

Inside iMac. Feedback from Database customers is pretty much a love letter for the iMac's speed and ease of use, particularly in regard to online access, Carroll said. "I got e-mail from a customer the other day who'd gotten on the Internet in 13 minutes, including taking it out of the box," he added.

Most home users want to do home finance, Internet access and e-mail, and the iMac "can do all that and then some," he added.

But that doesn't mean the iMac is without its problems. "We've had very few complaints," Carroll said, but those complaints generally fall into two specific areas.

The main complaint Carroll has heard has been from Mac users upgrading from older Macs and finding some of their software won't make the upgrade. "Some of the older machines are three to four processor versions old and (their software) doesn't work on the new iMac," Carroll said.

Also, the USB Universal Serial Bus connections for peripherals, introduced with the G3 and iMac, require customers who want to hook up older equipment, like the Apple Stylewriter 1500, to buy adapters, Carroll said.

There are adapters out there, but they are being made by small companies, he said.

That means they are not always readily available, something that is likely to change as demand increases.

An initial criticism of Apple's use of USB technology was that there were not many USB peripheral products on the market.

Since then, manufacturers have responded to the significant number of new iMac and G3 owners by producing USB machines.

Also, Carroll and Green agreed, USB is the wave of the future for both Macs and PCs.

One matter still at issue for users, however, is the fact that the iMac has no 3

1/2-inch floppy drive, giving users no way to back up files to disk or to save files on disk to be transported to another computer.

External disk drives are available at an additional cost, and users can establish storage space for their personal files online. All the software that comes with the iMac, whether preloaded or unloaded, is included on CD-ROM, so program backup is provided.

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