The hype is building. Can you hear it? At the end of next week, the first iMacs will hit the stores and then the streets. Just as they did in 1984, the MacFaithful will stand in long lines to claim their sexy new machines. They'll take them home, set them up, and be the envy of us all. And then the problems will begin. Oh, they won't be any worse problems than those suffered by any other personal computer model that's new to the market, but this isn't just any new personal computer. This is the iMac, Steve Jobs' first new Macintosh in a dozen years, the machine that simply has to be insanely great. For some it will be, but not for all.

It seems at times that I take my life in my hands when I dare to criticize Apple, but this is not so much a column of criticism as one of prediction. There were problems with the first Macs and with many models since. Apple either couldn't make enough of the right ones, in the case of the PowerBooks, or make the others right. That's just the way it is. Smallish production runs, revolutionary technology and short deadlines makes for problems. Expect a few for the iMac, too.

For one thing, it is very doubtful that there will be enough of the machines to go around. Apple's expectation, I have read over and over, is to sell 400,000 of the machines right away. I hope they do. They plan to have at least the first 30,000 of these machines in stores by next Friday. That, I doubt. As of last week, only about 5,000 iMacs had been produced. And a random sampling showed an out-of-box failure rate of 11 percent, which is vastly above Apple and the industry's average. These are just teething problems, sure, but they are problems nonetheless. You'll see stories about them.

The iMac is a revolutionary and wonderful machine, but it's not perfect. And as reality sets in, people will start to notice a few things. The CD-ROM drive is far too fragile, for example. People will bust them. The IrDA port has problems. And the only way to fix a bad power supply is to replace the entire chassis. But the biggest problems will be short supply and out-of-box failures, both of which will eventually be cured.

Now to those who, having read this, are ready to write me a few hundred damning messages, wouldn't you rather know this stuff than not?

If you really want to have something to complain about, try being a Microsoft customer in Israel or many other countries. They sure aren't in Kansas anymore.

Steve Ballmer, the new president of Microsoft, once explained to me at some length how important it was for Microsoft software to be the most pirated in the world. Huh? Here's the rationale. In countries where there are more PCs sold than operating systems or word processing programs, it is very hard to make money in the software business. Try to find an American software company that makes anything selling product in India, for example, or Russia. But as long as nobody is making any money, Microsoft still wants to compete for market share, even when it's market share for a stolen product. This is for two reasons. First, pirated software costs nothing to produce or support, so why the heck not? Second, there is always the hope that these countries can be brought into the family of nations that respect and pay for intellectual property rights, which means an instant windfall for whomever has been most wronged (has the biggest illegitimate market share), even though that market share came for free. And that's why Microsoft wants to be the most pirated software company on earth.

While there is plenty of software piracy in Israel, too, that's not the reason for what I wrote above. I just wanted to show a mainly American audience that the rules can be very different on the other side of the 200 mile offshore limit.

Take Israel, for example, where Microsoft doesn't provide service packs and doesn't fix bugs and where there is no tech support hotline. Can this be a sign of things to come for America?

Sure, Israel is notorious for piracy (and for bad service), but that has nothing to do with why Microsoft Israel doesn't service its products. The real reason, as stated by the CEO of Microsoft Israel, is that registered users insisted on calling for support (what chutzpah). In other words, as I have pointed out before, Microsoft just doesn't give a damn about its customers. And in Israel at least, they are getting away with it.

With Windows '95, for example, while Microsoft took the trouble to develop a product with full Hebrew and Arabic support, they directly translated the manuals into Hebrew without bothering to bring to anyone's attention that the Install procedure is different. So when you follow the three-step procedure in the manual, you are guaranteed failure! Funny, the ads say upgrading to Win95 is a no-brainer. The ads always do.

When asked about this, the head of customer support at Microsoft Israel said that purchasers should have known they needed an expert to install the program. Microsoft has promised a service pack for over a year without delivering. Why release service packs when you can charge for upgrades?

So where is the government in all this? Where is the Israeli equivalent of the Department of Justice? Under Israeli law, people who use their computers for business are not considered consumers, so consumer protection laws don't apply. When the brand-new Israeli anti-trust unit was approached with the thought that Microsoft's cavalier attitude sprang from its monopoly position, they said they wouldn't act until they saw what happened to Microsoft in the U.S. courts.

Israel is a small country, and what happens there hardly dictates what happens here, but there is a disturbing trend. In both countries, there appears to be a shift lately from complaints of lofty conspiracy theories about Microsoft world domination via the Internet to, "They make products that they know don't work and don't even bother to fix 'em."

In Israel, Microsoft makes piracy a "mitzvah," which my dictionary defines as a "meritorious or charitable act." "It's your own fault," the husband of one of my Israeli friends said to her, "because you actually bought the program."

From one perspective, I suppose that would make Steve Ballmer happy.