Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, and do your best Carol Anne Freeling, 'cause they're heeeere! We'd had our hopes, of course; over the weekend, faithful viewer Richard Plotkin tipped us off to a New York Times article on 64-bit computing which referred to the Power Mac G5 as "set to arrive in stores today." The thing is, we've all been burned by reputable (or even "reputable") news sources before, and since there was always a chance that we were getting Jaysoned on this, we tried to keep our excitement down to a simmer. But feel free to go to full boil, because as faithful viewer Lynch Allison was first to point out, for confirmation you now need look no further than Apple's own home page. (If you're still on the fence over whether or not to blow the funds on one of these puppies, the box design alone should be enough to push you over the edge. Mmmmmmmm.) And look, we've got a press release to match!

Now, judging by the handy wiener dog calendar on the wall, it's... well, it's December 2002, which doesn't do us a lot of good. (Is August too late to buy a new calendar? We've been kinda busy.) But according to iCal, it's only the 18th of August, which means that Apple met its "in August" shipping deadline with almost two full weeks to spare. There is a slight catch, however, which is that only the two single-processor systems are shipping so far, and while Apple reports that it's taken a tenth of a million preorders for G5 Power Macs (holy yikes!), based on our own anecdotal evidence, we estimate that of those 100,000 preorders, single-processor orders make up about... oh... six of them. Call it seven. Still, that means there are going to be seven very happy Mac users once the UPS guy plays Santa in a few days.

As for the 99,993 of you waiting for full-power dual 2.0 GHz rigs instead, hang in there-- Phil "Steve Was Busy Playing 'Escape Velocity' So I'm Doing the Press Release Quote" Schiller claims that Apple is "right on track to deliver the dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 later this month." The clock's a-tickin', but with only thirteen days to go, Phil sounds sure enough that there's little reason to doubt his word. Plus, he was a Boy Scout, ya know. (Okay, we're just guessing. But he's got "Mac vs. Pentium Bake-off Merit Badge" written all over him.)

And this "shipping now" thing is even good news for the rest of us, meaning "the poor slobs who can't scrape together the filthy lucre for a G5 of any flavor right this second"; the fact that production systems are shipping to customers strongly implies that demo units ought to be surfacing at Apple retail stores any day now. The few stores we called at random confirm that they're still just as G5less as the rest of us, but Mac OS Rumors claims that a few locations have them right now, and all stores are expecting perforated aluminum show ponies within days, if not hours. Well, okay, days are hours, just more of them, but basically the point we're trying to convey is Real Soon Now™. And who knows? When we get the opportunity to fondle a G5 up close and personal, there's always a chance we'll be inspired to make that lateral career move into grand larceny we've been putting off for so long.

Meanwhile, not to poop all over the G5 shipping celebration, but, uh, suppose we might see new PowerBooks anytime soon? We're only bringing it up for a purely selfish reason, i.e. while Mac OS X does a wondrous job of protecting our Pismo from operating system crashes, it turns out that it's surprisingly less effective at preventing hardware crashes. As in, three feet down onto a hardwood floor. Apple should really be clearer about what they mean by "crash protection"; if we'd known, we wouldn't have been juggling the thing with a lit torch and a chainsaw. (The torch and chainsaw both survived intact, you'll be relieved to hear.)

Following preliminary diagnostics and fifteen minutes with a pair of needle-nose pliers (true!), the patient is up and running again-- a grand testament to Apple engineering, considering that the PowerBook was open, on, and playing a "How to Tie a Karate Belt" QuickTime movie off its hard disk when it went boom. (Hey, it's all part of the act.) But we're a little leery of its AC connector, which was the point of impact, and all told we figure we probably just took a good two years off this sucker's lifespan, so as far as we're concerned, we're living on borrowed time. Which is why we're even more gosh-darn interested than ever to see what magic Apple spews forth when it finally deigns to toss the pro portable market a long-overdue bone. After all, didn't titanium become Yesterday's Metal™ in, like, January? (No offense to TiBook owners, of course-- c'mon, we're the ones still sportin' black plastic and an upside-down logo.)

You may recall that the last date we'd heard bandied about for poppin'-fresh PowerBooky goodness was on or about Tuesday the 19th, which just happens to be tomorrow. Well, while it's not quite as nice as an intro tomorrow, there's still some good news for all you other all-thumbs Pismo-and-torch-and-chainsaw-jugglers out there who find yourselves in the same boat as us: Think Secret's sources insist that development of new 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks "wrapped up" earlier this month, and one source tells them that the new models "are expected to arrive later this week." As for 12-inchers, those "should be ready for release in September."

Personally, we'd probably hold out for a 12-incher (assuming the Pismo clings to life that long), because as far as we're concerned, portability comes first; there's surprisingly little room left in a diaper bag after you toss in the baby wipes, rash ointment, a changing pad, a towel, plastic bags, a change of clothes for the kid, a change of clothes for the dad, sunscreen, Infant's Tylenol, a plastic bag full of Cheerios, two board books about hippos, and a squeaky ladybug with crinkly wings. Oh, and a diaper. Here's hoping that the rumors of the auto-sensing backlit keyboard filtering down into the 12-incher come true, because if they do, then we wouldn't be above hastening our Pismo's demise just a smidge once the new 12s hit the shelves. Perhaps we could add an open can of 40-weight motor oil to the juggling act to make it a little more "challenging"...

Here's hoping that those of you who lost power in that eight-states-plus-part-of-Canada blackout last Friday managed to survive without resorting to excessive cannibalism. Personally, we managed to emerge unscathed-- seriously, not a scathe on us. Reportedly some parts of the Boston area were affected, but we didn't even know there was a blackout until family members started calling to ask if we'd devolved into mole people yet, which we initially assumed was some sort of code that addicts use over cell phones when asking about scoring some crack. Meanwhile, despite the fact that parts of New Jersey also got popped, AtAT's Jersey-dwelling server somehow dodged the bullet, too. We'd say our luck had changed if it weren't for, you know, that whole PowerBook-dropping thing.

But even if you weren't forced to fend for yourselves without the benevolent bounty of The Outlet, is there a chance that you might still be indirectly affected by the outage? Faithful viewer Joe pointed out an eWeek article which reveals that, yes, that super-cool new IBM chip-pumping plant in East Fishkill (the one that Apple touts so often in its G5 propaganda) was indeed shut down by the blackout, "affecting production as key products for Nvidia and Apple ramp up." Reportedly the production lines stayed down for "about two days." So considering that Apple's given its word that dual G5s will ship by the end of the month, which is only thirteen days away, is losing two days' worth of production going to change things?

Well, no. For one thing, Phil Schiller's reiteration of the "end of the month" ship date was published three days after the lights went out, and you'd think he might have changed his mind if Fishkill going dark were actually going to affect anything. IBM reports that the Fishkill plant automatically shifted into "maintenance mode" when the power failed, "halting the line and slowing down the production tools so that critical components in the semiconductor lithography tools weren't affected." Nothing in the $2.5 billion plant was damaged, so basically, aside from the annoyance and expense of losing a couple of days' worth of product, no harm, no foul. Which means just one thing: nice try, Intel!

Oh, come on-- you didn't seriously think that it was a coincidence that the plant cranking out G5s got taken offline just before Apple promised to ship its Pentium-butchering Power Macs, did you? We figure Chipzilla (with or without Microsoft's help-- depends on whether you like your conspiracy theories to involve actual conspiring or not) was behind the whole thing, engineering a blackout as a last-ditch desperation play to try to keep the G5's scorching power out of the hands of the public. Considering that officials are apparently still puzzled over just how the whole thing happened, the whole thing smells like corporate sabotage to us. What's next, floods? Earthquakes? Killer bees? Do your worst!