The PowerPC G4 processor: it's not just for breakfast anymore. Remember that oh-so-fun year and a half during which the G4 remained stuck at the 500 MHz level, as offerings from Intel and AMD punched clear through the gigahertz barrier? Happy times, right? Well, despite Apple's attempts to deflate the Megahertz Myth, people still buy computers based largely on clock speed-- and even if you ignore megahertz comparisons entirely, few Mac users would claim that Motorola has advanced the PowerPC overall at a blistering pace. Our point is that the PowerPC just isn't developing as quickly as it probably should, and the most likely reason why isn't tough to spot: no one's buying G4s but Apple.

Think about it for a second; you're Motorola, you're hurtling towards Unprofitableville at a breakneck pace, you're eventually going to have to lay off a slew of workers, and overall you've got limited resources to keep afloat. So do you invest a ton of time and money in improving a chip design that's used only by a single computer manufacturer with 5% of the desktop market? Not bloody likely. As long as Apple was the only big customer buying G4s, we just can't believe that Motorola was making G4 development a top-level, code-red, damn-the-torpedoes-and-full-speed-ahead priority. (If G4 development was a priority and it still took the company eighteen months to break 500 MHz, then Motorola was simply incompetent, and that's far, far worse. We're trying to be optimistic, here-- not to mention charitable.)

But what if the customer landscape were to change? What if another large company started buying G4 processors, thus increasing demand for what has been essentially a niche technology? Well, we're about to find out. Faithful viewer Abe J. pointed out a Motorola press release listed over at MacMinute in which the company announces that it's about to start selling 7450-class G4s to no less an industry giant than Cisco. No fooling, folks; Cisco apparently plans to stick G4s in some of its "next generation Internet routers." If they need G4s to function, we can only assume that these are some serious routers that Cisco's putting together.

So what we're hoping is that Cisco's demand will join forces with Apple's, and together, the combination of Dragon-style and Tiger-style Kung Fu will form an unstoppable force for good, driving PowerPC development forward into a new Golden Age and vanquishing the encroaching x86 darkness forever. Or something. The only potential downside is if Apple and Cisco start duking it out over who gets first dibs on the newest, fastest chips, but we're not overly concerned, because clearly Steve's signature move-- the dreaded "Neck of the Black Turtle"-- would put a serious hurt on anything Cisco has up its sleeve.

Well, the AtAT staff is still fighting a wicked head cold that's plagued us since the Expo. (Evidently New York cold germs are a tough breed.) This particular illness has passed from one staff member to the next, leaving a thousand sneezes and a thousand used tissues in its wake, but we like to look on the bright side: we may be stuffy, we may be fatigued, and we may feel like we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl one or two times too many, but at least we're not seeing purple llamas crawling on the walls. And as an added bonus, neither are we seeing Fortune 100 CEOs posting to web site "talkback" pages. Let's hear it for keeping the obvious visual hallucinations at bay! Woo-hoo!!

Oh, wait-- scratch that last bit. Let's back up for a second. Remember TechTV's G4 vs. P4 Photoshop shootout last week? Basically, TechTV was so skeptical of Steve Jobs's onstage bake-off at the last Stevenote that its staff decided to try it themselves, apparently in an attempt to prove that Apple's demo was rigged. Yet despite TechTV's own claim that with "benchmarketing" any system could be shown to be faster than any other, the station's own lab tests (which pitted the now-low-end 733 MHz G4 against a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4, the fastest and most expensive Pentium available) showed the G4 winning in three of the six Photoshop-based speed tests. Of course, what DreckTV failed to mention was that if you actually add up the total times taken by each system to complete all six tasks, the G4 beat the P4 by 16.2 seconds, or a 16.5% margin. Saith TechTV, "Did the sub-gigahertz G4 win out over the 1.8-GHz Intel behemoth? Well, yes and no." In other words, "yes, but since this test totally blew up in our faces, let's not add up the times and just call it a tie."

That brings us to an article at MacUnlimited, which notes that after TechTV published the results of its little "test," Mac fans came out of the proverbial woodwork to note that, rather than refuting Steve's onstage test, the new results showed it to be completely and absolutely legit. (At this point we can only surmise that TechTV's Jim Loudermouth is pursing his lips in consternation.) The bit that has us wondering about our cold medicine, though, is MacUnlimited's mention that one of those Talkback participants claims to be the CEO of an unspecified "Fortune 100 company," who "was just about to command a rollout of 10,000 P4 machines (Dells)" but is now going to "purchase all Apples" instead. It's not just us, it is? You see it too, right?

So does this cold have us loopy enough to believe for a second that the CEO of a Fortune 100 company likes to take time out from his busy schedule of buying tens of thousands of desktop computers to post to Talkback pages? Thankfully, no-- because otherwise we'd probably be beyond saving. Still, it's a nice little fantasy. Pipe dreams from fake CEOs aside, clearly TechTV has proved two things: 1) the G4 is just as much faster than the P4 as Steve said it was, at least as far as Photoshop is concerned, and 2) TechTV won't admit it was wrong without a thermonuclear device aimed at its families, household pets, and private parts. "Comparing the performance of a Mac to the performance of a PC is difficult at best," they say. Well, here's a hint, TechTV-- try adding up the numbers. Now pardon us, as we've got to grab a broom and knock some llamas off the walls.

And today in the "This Really Should Be Funny, But We're Not Sure Why" category, we take a quick look at the baffling issue of random junk you might find rattling around inside your brand new Macintosh. Faithful viewer Edward Liu was perusing the reader reports on the new "Quicksilver" Power Macs over at MacInTouch when he noticed one particularly noteworthy submission. Scroll all the way to the bottom, and you'll find a report from one Apple Store customer whose Power Mac was ordered without the optional internal Zip drive, but came with "an empty Zip bezel installed." Weirder still, when he opened up the Power Mac's enclosure, he discovered "a Zip disk inside it, just floating around."

Now, by "floating," we assume he means that the Zip disk in question was rattling around loose, smacking into various internal components during shipment, etc. and not that it was literally hovering there in mid-air when he opened the Power Mac's side door-- although the latter situation wouldn't be too much more bizarre than the former. Apple mistakenly shipping a non-Zip-enabled system with a Zip front bezel? We can write that off as a simple (and ultimately dull) configuration error. But Apple dropping a Zip disk inside the Power Mac itself strikes us as a little more entertaining and a lot more surreal. Was it a mistake? A special promotion? Am exercise in alternative packaging?

Our money's on "special promotion." Taking a cue from Cracker Jacks and the fine old tradition of sticking small plastic toys in cereal boxes, Apple figured that it should finally put the Power Mac's easy-open side to good use-- by shipping a select number of Quicksilvers with special prizes inside. We figure that bonus Zip disks are just one of a vast selection of prizes that Apple is test-marketing on a wide demographic of Power Mac customers. Once enough data has been collected, Apple will finalize the prize selection and announce that all Quicksilvers from then on will ship with surprise goodies inside. (Hey, c'mon-- it'll work better than another freakin' rebate, right?)