Another day, another 24 hours stuck at 500 MHz. It's like we're all doing time in the Half-Gigahertz County Correctional Facility, marking the days on the wall with a crayon. If you want to get more extreme, let's say the Mac's on death row and waiting for a pardon from the governor-- in the form of a press release announcing a clock speed increase to get back into the game. These days we're finding the wait all the more galling, because the lull in Apple-related news means there are fewer distractions from the fact that the PowerPC is, developmentally speaking, just sitting there... at least from a user's perspective. And without insider knowledge, we're all just sitting in the Clock Speed Big House-- playing the harmonica, yelling at the screws, and fashioning hand-made shivs out of bedsprings.

Luckily, though, the kind folks at Mac OS Rumors have come to visit with news from outside. It's a longish (but extremely interesting) report, so here are the juicy bits: 1) as widely expected, 600 MHz dual-G4 Power Macs at January's Macworld Expo; 2) Power Macs with 733 MHz G4e processors "by April or early May 2001," probably alongside Mac OS X 1.0; 3) 800 MHz to 1 GHz G4e processors in "mid to late 2001"; and 4) quad-processor Power Macs next year after Mac OS X's release, probably at Macworld Expo NYC in July. So if you're the sort who puts a lot of stock in rumors, you can look forward to some real progress next year.

Now, we're sure there are those of you who are gnawing your own arms off over the fact that even if Apple does follow the timetable reported at MOSR and ends the year-long drought by shipping a 600 MHz dual-G4 system in January, the Mac will still be at least 900 MHz behind the competition. Well, what did you expect? At this point we think it's safe to say that even if someone caffeinates Motorola's water supply and sets its butt on fire, the company is never going to crank the PowerPC's clock speeds up to Intel's levels-- at least, not before our grandkids die of old age.

But a 100% increase in clock speed within the coming year, plus spiffy performance-boosting advances in the upcoming UMA-2 motherboard architecture, plus a symmetrically-processing, Altivec-enhanced operating system, plus dual- and quad-processor Macs adds up to what we expect will be a ridiculous amount of real-world speed-- possibly far, far better than anything the Wintel world can scrape together. On top of that, if you believe the reports that for many uses the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is slower than a 1 GHz Pentium III (and doesn't yet support multiprocessing), you can take solace in the knowledge that while the G4 hasn't gotten any faster in a year or so, at least it's not slowing down. So let's wait a couple more months and see what happens. C'mon, after the past year in the joint, you can do that time standing on your head.

Speaking of the Pentium 4, the early reviews citing its lackluster performance in office-type applications may well have given the new chip a black eye in terms of public image. Sure, there will always be uninformed shoppers who only see that 4 is bigger than 3-- er, III-- and 1.5 ("That's one and a half, right?") GHz is bigger than 1 GHz, and will then just plunk down the cash for the "better" processor. But with a big-ticket item like a P4 system, most of the customers are probably doing at least a little homework before slapping down the plastic. If that homework reveals that a cheaper Pentium III might well be faster for most tasks, well, the P4 might not exactly fly off the shelves.

So how is Intel planning to fight this PR problem? Simple: by enlisting the help of a turnaround king. Remember back in 1996 and 1997 when Apple was in such bad shape, most people thought the company had already gone out of business? Back then the Apple logo was like a warning sign to consumers. These days, though, the Apple brand is far closer to the ideal of being a mark of quality, innovation, and ease of use-- and arguably, what kicked off its recovery was the debut of the "Think different" ad campaign. Well, get this: according to a TechWeb article kindly pointed out to us by faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini, Intel has gone ahead and hired Ken Segall (the man other than Steve behind Apple's Emmy-winning ad campaign) to produce print and TV ads for the Pentium 4. In other words, the company's hired a Big Gun to figure out how to hawk its Big Chips.

If Segall was able to pull Apple out of its PR death spiral, then putting a happy face on Intel's new processor should be a cakewalk by comparison. (Then again, presumably this time around he won't have Steve's help.) Don't expect a "Think Pentium" ad campaign anytime soon, though; apparently everything's still in the planning stage right now, and the P4 ads aren't expected to run until this spring. Until then we've all got a few more months of Pentium III ads featuring blue men behaving in strange and occasionally self-destructive ways. But hey, even we have to admit that the existing Pentium III ads (which, just like "Think different," don't say a single thing about the product they're pushing) are marginally more entertaining than Apple's latest commercials. Especially when taking into account the fact that, as many faithful viewers have pointed out, Blue Man Group uses Macs to run its phenomenally successful stage show...

Right now, we bet there's a whole lot of status that comes with being on the Mac OS X development team. Think about it-- this is the operating system that's going to revolutionize the platform. It marks a quantum leap forward in guts-level architecture, finally bringing Mac users plenty of buzzwords like preemptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, and protected memory. It's also a quantum leap forward (or sideways, or backward, depending on your point of view) for the Mac interface; whether you love it or hate it, you won't be able to ignore it. Hands down, the release of Mac OS X is probably going to be the single biggest event in the history of the platform since Steve took the covers off the first Macintosh. So yeah, the people working on the project are probably pretty juiced.

Which means, of course, that the Mac OS 9.1 team is probably playing Peter Parker to the Mac OS X team's Flash Thompson. After all, Mac OS 9.1 is only a 0.96 increase (sort of) from Mac OS 9.0.4, whereas Mac OS X doesn't just get a full whole number-- it ranks a shift to Roman numerals. Mac OS X was rebuilt from the ground up and features an exciting new user interface called Aqua-- while, according to a preview at Think Secret, the biggest changes that Mac OS 9.1 has to offer are a long-overdue "Windows" menu in the Finder, a revamped Mouse control panel which shows icons of the new Pro Mouse (ooooooo), and a redone Startup Disk control panel that-- you guessed it-- makes it easier to boot into Mac OS X. Simply put, Mac OS 9.1 is not exactly groundbreaking stuff. We imagine that the Mac OS X team is, if you'll pardon a politically incorrect and gender-biased phrase used purely for illustrative purposes, "getting hotter chicks."

Still, just like Peter Parker (who sheds his mild-mannered wallflower guise and protects the innocent as the amazing Spider-Man, while that jock Flash Thompson's out bullying the squares or something), the Mac OS 9.1 team deserves a lot more credit than it's likely to get. Remember, True Believers, Mac OS X's not likely to surface until May, and even then it's probably going to be a while before most of us are using it. Plus, there'll be plenty of Mac users with hardware that simply won't run Mac OS X, which means that a big chunk of the Mac community's going to be using Mac OS 9.x well into 2002 and beyond, not to mention the fact that 9.1's almost certainly going to be the basis of Mac OS X's Classic environment-- so you'd better start showing 9.1 a little more respect. Aqua, shmaqua; sure, Mac OS X's the future of the Macintosh, but Mac OS 9.1 is the immediate future of the Macintosh. So start getting ready to take that new Mouse control panel for a spin.