Truth in advertising-- impossible, you say? While it's true that the whole point of marketing and advertising is generally to make a product seem much better (and therefore more necessary) than it really is, occasionally we're lucky enough to stumble upon some entity keeping the hyperbole out of its adspeak. For a while we thought Apple might become a shining example of a company whose marketing department had decided to keep its product claims tethered well within the realm of reality. We blame the iPod for getting our hopes up.

Yes, Apple teased the press before the unveiling by calling the iPod a "breakthrough" digital device, which is at least mildly debatable, but when it came down to the numbers, Apple played more than fair. For one thing, most digital audio players we've seen are advertised as being able to hold a lot more music than can be realistically expected. "Up to two hours of music!" they trumpet-- neglecting to mention that those two hours's worth of songs have to be encoded at a paltry 32 kbps, and will therefore sound like an AM transistor radio that's been set on fire. And battery life tends to be way overestimated as well.

However, with the iPod, Apple claimed it gives you "1,000 songs in your pocket." That assumes a very generous (and default in iTunes) 160 kbps encoding rate, and even then, it may be a bit of an underestimate; our iPod currently has 1,336 160 kbps songs on it. And whereas Apple claims that the iPod has a ten-hour battery life, we've easily gotten twelve hours of continuous play on a full charge. Clearly this heralds a new era of realism in the marketing blurbs, right?

But then we come to the new iMac, and a return to the old "it's true-- technically" school of marketingspeak. Specifically, faithful viewer jens@dna noticed that Apple claims that the new iMac has "five 12-Mbps USB ports" which let you "connect your iMac to hundreds of digital cameras, printers, scanners, external hard disks, and joysticks." If you've stared obsessively at the iMac from all angles (and really, who among us hasn't?), you already know that there are only three USB ports punched into the rear of the system. So what's with this "five" nonsense?

Well, it turns out that Apple is apparently counting the two USB ports on the included Pro Keyboard. There's just one little problem with that; you can plug all the scanners/printers/joysticks you want into the keyboard's USB ports and they're simply not going to work until you-- that's right-- plug the keyboard into one of the iMac's USB ports. Which means that while the iMac does have five USB ports, you can only use four of them. And then, of course, you still have to plug in the mouse...

So unless you're planning on controlling your new iMac via a telepathic link, those five USB ports are really three. Not that we're complaining, mind you, especially since that's still a 50% improvement over all prior iMacs, and any feeling we had that Apple was suddenly going to go all Polyanna with its marketing claims was entirely a product of our own psychosis. On a completely different note, did anyone else notice that the new iMac's LCD display magically "floats in mid-air"? Coooool.