Quite a day, wasn't it? While there weren't any real surprises during Steve Jobs' Seybold keynote (at least, not for those of us who scour the rumors sites looking for the early dirt), the stuff that got announced was enough to bring tears to the eyes of the Macintosh faithful who've stayed with the platform through thick and thin. In other words, things were mighty thin a couple of years ago, so we're all glad to see so much thickness in the air right about now. Industry-leading inventory levels, a spiffy new operating system release on deck, healthy pre-order numbers for the iBook, etc. all make for a happy picture-- but of course, the star of the show was the new Big Kahuna in Apple's lineup: the Power Macintosh G4.

There's a ton of info on this speedy new puppy sprayed all over the 'net like mosquito repellent at a nudist Swamp Cookout, so we won't spend too much time hitting the technical details, but we do want to say this: Apple's really, really good at marketing these days. The chewy goodness at the heart of the G4 processor is AltiVec, the technology which can speed certain operations by a factor of a gazillion, or whatever. But AltiVec's kind of a dorky name, so Apple calls it the "Velocity Engine." That's just so cool. And the G4's enclosure is the G3's done right. Gone is that goofy Blueberry, which really detracted from the G3's kick-butt Pentium-chomping performance (it said "Fisher Price" when it should have said "Submit Before I Destroy You"), and in its place are the new "professional colors": clear, silver, and a gorgeous metallic translucent grey which Apple calls "graphite." Geez, even if all that got announced today was the same old G3 systems with the G4's new case, we'd probably run right out and buy one. We can't wait to see one in person.

That said, it's worth noting that Big Steve wasn't being 100% honest with us today. When he mentioned that the Power Mac G4 had 2x AGP graphics, we were surprised, because that implies a Sawtooth motherboard, which we'd repeatedly heard was delayed; we were banking on the "Yikes!" rumor that the first G4s would actually ship with a slightly tweaked version of the Yosemite motherboard in the currently available G3s. And when Steve said that G4s were available immediately, we thought Apple's elves had pulled off a miracle and gotten Sawtooth out the door. But if you look at the tech specs of Apple's new systems, you'll notice some big differences in the G4 that's "shipping now": PCI graphics, lower max RAM, thinner memory bandwidth, slower USB, slower ATA bus, no internal FireWire port, no AirPort capability-- yup, that's "Yikes!" all right. Did you notice how Steve implied that all the G4s had AGP graphics, built-in AirPort antennas, etc.? He was being a Sneaky Pete. Sawtooth G4s won't be available for another month yet.

That's not to say that the "shipping immediately" G4/400s are anything to scoff at; heck, we sure wouldn't kick one out of bed for eating crackers. But while we hate the idea of Apple losing any sales, we also don't want people ordering systems thinking they're getting something they're not. If you want a G4 right away and you don't need the advanced features of the Sawtooth motherboard (and plenty of people don't), by all means, grab a Yikes! and be the envy of all those around you. Otherwise, wait another month and Sawtooth can be yours.

By the way, we can't apologize enough for the server problems that plagued us during such an entertaining time in Apple's continuing journey. The lesson to learn here: a 6500 with a G3 upgrade is lots slower than a beige G3, especially at I/O-- slow enough where the traffic caused by hordes of Seybold-crazed AtAT junkies was enough to grind the system to a nasty, twisted halt culminating in repeated crashes of impressive magnitude. (Really, you folks should be beaming with pride right about now.) We're back on the beige G3 temporarily until we can raise the cash for a suitable replacement-- and we're hoping the new G4s also send G3 prices crashing through the floor so we can pick up some good gear cheap. Hopefully this marks the end of this latest round of hard times.

You wanna hear another thing that struck us about the G4 introduction? Apple's got some neat ideas about how to win the Megahertz Wars. We're talking about the annoying way in which Intel manages to keep squeezing blood from a stone that most people thought gave its last pint back in '97: the x86 processor architecture. Basically, Intel's engineers are so good, they just keep scraping more and more performance out of a fundamental chip design that, in technological terms, should be dead by now. Actually, make that dead, buried, and converted to fossil fuel. You've heard of dog years? Well, in chip years, the Pentium is probably about seven million years old and still cranking away-- spewing heat and gobbling power, but cranking nonetheless. And so the more efficient PowerPC, while generally acknowledged as faster by those in the know, actually runs at a slower clock speed than the rocket-engines-on-roller-skates Pentium III. But what does the Average Schmoe™ look at when comparing computer speeds? Megahertz.

So here's Joe Schmoe, looking at a Mac and a PC. The Mac has, let's say, a 500 MHz G4 processor. The PC is equipped with a 600 MHz Pentium III. Joe Schmoe's wetware math unit spits out "600 > 500" and voilà: the PC is faster. But those who watched the bake-off during Jobs' keynote know different; in Apple's (admittedly controlled and optimized) tests, the 500 MHz G4 beat the living pants off the Pentium III. But Joe Schmoe doesn't tune into keynote webcasts-- he just looks at the numbers in the CompUSA flyer. And the numbers he looks at is clock speed in Megahertz. Frustrating, isn't it?

So what's the answer? Due to its fundamentally different design, the PowerPC will always lag behind Intel's chips in raw clock speed-- at least, that's what some chip geeks tell us. So waiting for Motorola and IBM to catch up is pointless. Heck, AMD's got 650 MHz Athlon chips now, and CNET reports that Intel just announced a 700 MHz Pentium III that will ship in October-- just about at the same time that Apple rolls out its fastest G4 Mac, running at 500 MHz. So Macs are always going to look slower than PCs on paper, as long as megahertz rules the day.

And that's where Apple's thinking "different." See, Apple's hit upon the reason why "normal" people like to compare clock speeds: "Megahertz" is fun to say. It's just basically a goofy word that people subconsciously like to hear coming out of their own mouths. So Apple's Gordian-knot-cutting solution to the Megahertz Wars is to detract attention from the meaningless raw clock speed numbers, and get people focused on Gigaflops instead. Face it: "gigaflop" is even more fun to say than "megahertz." Plus, since it actually refers to the number of operations that a chip can perform in a given time, it's probably a more useful measure of relative processor speed than clock speed anyway-- at least, for floating point performance. So can Apple get people to look at flops instead of hertz? Depends on how well they play their cards. We at AtAT encourage every viewer to use the word "gigaflop" at least once in every conversation, in an effort to get it to catch on. C'mon, you know you want to...

There was so much good news today that it's almost hard to focus on individual announcements. Certainly the Power Macintosh G4 stole the show, but we have to address a piece of information that didn't directly relate to the professional concerns of the Seybold crowd. We're talking about Steve's announcement that there have been over 140,000 iBook preorders since the consumer portable was first unveiled in July. Sure, the graphics geeks in the crowd were drooling over the Photoshop performance of Apple's latest pro Mac, but we couldn't help repeating that number in our heads. 140,000. It's right there in black in white in an Apple press release, in case you missed the keynote. That's a lot of iBooks.

In fact, if you're the visualizing type, a stack of 140,000 iBooks would be over four and a half miles high. For the financially oriented, if you break that down into dollars, at $1599 a pop, we're talking about $223,860,000. Pretty good for a computer that won't be shipping for at least another couple of weeks yet. It's even more impressive when you break the numbers down into a daily average, as the Mac Observer did: that's over three thousand iBook advance orders every single day since the product was first introduced. And John Dvorak would have you believe that there isn't a "real man" among them.

Come to think of it, we can't refute John's claim with anecdotal evidence; the only iBook preorder we know about in a personal sense involves a female family member who put down a deposit at CompUSA last week without ever having seen an iBook live. In fact, the only exposure she's had to the iBook at all is a quick glimpse at a brochure we brought back from Macworld Expo. Currently she uses Windows both at home and at work, and to the best of our knowledge, she's never even seen the Mac OS in use, let alone sat down and used a Mac-- and yet she was willing to fork over a couple of hundred dollars to reserve an iBook. If that's any indication of the iBook's future popularity, then Apple's biggest problem will be building them fast enough. In fact, perhaps we should all pray that Dvorak was right-- imagine how much back-order trouble Apple will be in if the "real men" start buying them, too.