Grouse, grouse, grouse; man, Apple clearly had the right idea in mind when it decided on a low-key intro for the new Power Macs if all this complaining is any indication. Given how long it took to get here, you'd think that the G4 finally reaching 1 GHz would be cause for celebration-- and the fact that Apple's giving us two of them would be cause for thundering applause, merrymaking in the streets, and a bunch of arrests for public drunkenness. Instead we get a lot of Mac users who, despite our every plea to the contrary, got their hopes up for a Power Mac G5 running at 2.8 GHz with telepathic input capabilities, all wrapped up in a crystalline enclosure shaped like a large dachshund. And because of that, now they're complaining that the new Power Macs still use PC-133 RAM, don't have "Gigawire," and (horror of horrors) still look the same way they did six months ago. Boy, life is hard, isn't it?

So yeah, imagine what would have happened if Apple had scheduled a special press event and pumped out the sort of pre-release hype it's been so fond of tossing around lately, telling everyone to expect something that'll change life as we know it. Imagine the utter silence broken only by the chirping of crickets when Steve produced, with a flourish, a G4 that runs at the astounding speed of one whole gigahertz. Then imagine the scathing press and word of mouth the next day: "Apple finally catches up to Intel-- 18 months later." The new Power Macs are an incremental improvement, and a solid one at that-- but if the whining in the Mac camp can be taken as a minuscule sampling of the teeth-gnashing we would have gotten from the press at large, the stealth intro was undoubtedly the right decision.

Meanwhile, look on the bright side, Smacky: improvement is a never-ending journey that is a reward unto itself. (We know this to be true, because we saw it on a wall plaque from Successories.) If you need further evidence to that effect, Apple is even now improving the Power Mac in ways that'll make your head spin. But don't take our word for it-- just ask Matthew Rothenberg over at eWeek. In addition to being one swell fella, Matthew has always seemed to have an "in" with some pretty nifty sources privy to Apple's top secret hithers and thithers, and as faithful viewer William Bonde points out, Mr. Rothenberg is currently making noises about "new towers that already offer clock speeds in the neighborhood of 1.6 GHz and triple the performance of the current systems' 133 MHz system bus." On top of that, these not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Macs also reportedly boast "new versions of FireWire and USB," "DDR RAM," and a "faster interface to hard drives."

So when can we expect these MegaMacs? Well, Matthew seems to think they'll surface somewhat before the July Expo. Originally that would have sounded more than a little aggressive to our pessimistic ears, since we're pretty seriously resigned to waiting until at least late this year for an honest-to-goodness Power Mac G5. However, if what's being proposed is yet another Quicksilver enclosure packing a next-generation motherboard and faster Apollo G4s, then actually, that might be reasonable. It's just a "What If?" scenario, you understand, like the one in which Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four, but we can definitely imagine Quicksilvers with UMA-2 motherboards and faster Apollos in four to six months, and UMA-2 G5s with all-new enclosures at, say, next January's Expo. (If you're the type who needs something to complain about, you may want to get a head start and begin preparing now.)

In light of the current brouhaha in Maine over Governor King's plan to chuck $25 million at Apple in exchange for a couple of dozen dozen dozen dozen iBooks for that state's junior high school students, it's probably worth checking back in with good ol' Henrico County in Virginia, who attempted a similar educational initiative in its own high schools starting last year. You probably recall that the Henrico project hasn't been without its snags, both technical in nature ("chronic network problems and hardware flaws") and on the not-quite-so-technical side (students downloading so much porn the iBooks self-destruct in shame).

We strongly suspect that there's very little that can really be done about the porn thing; if history has shown us anything, it's that if you give a teenager any technology more advanced than a rubber band and one of those little plastic things that holds the bread bag closed, said teenager, regardless of IQ or innate technical ability, will suddenly turn into MacGyver and find some way to use that technology to look at pictures of naked people. But according to an article in Education Week, Henrico's had other problems-- people instant-messaging in class, bandwidth overload from students illegally trading digital songs and movies, and, of course, the perennial favorite: some kid hacking into his teachers' iBooks to change his grades (or maybe to find the really good porn).

As a result, starting tomorrow, all of the students in Henrico County will have to turn in their iBooks for "maintenance." Said maintenance includes doubling the RAM, running diagnostic checks, and performing a handful of... well, let's call them "performance-improving tasks." The Henrico techs will be disabling file-sharing, deleting IM applications, and preventing unauthorized software from being installed by locking the iBooks into "school," "home," and "testing" logins designed to prevent the machines from being used for, well, fun. So it's bye-bye to games, MP3-trading, and pretty much every other unsanctioned use of the iBooks-- other than the porn, of course, which will still find some way to survive.

Actually, it'll be interesting to hear how long it takes the students to circumvent these measures designed to "cut out the extraneous activity unrelated to the instructional program," as Henrico's director of technology puts it in a Wired article. Anyone care to start the pool? We'll take February 23rd-- we'd pick something earlier, but we hear tell that those gol-durned young 'uns are lazy these days, in addition to having no respect for their elders.

C'mon, how many entities actually manage to score major entertainment industry awards in the fields of both broadcast television and recorded music? Not many, we'll wager, so it's definitely noteworthy that, on top of winning one Emmy for its "Think different" commercial and another for inventing FireWire, now our own beloved Apple has to clear a space on its trophy shelf for a Grammy, as well. And no, it's not for Phil Schiller's soulful rendition of "Let's Get It On," popular as that was in Europe; faithful viewer Bill Rutledge informs us that it's a technical Grammy for the company's "inventiveness and versatility" which has made Apple "the leading architect in bringing computer technology into the studio and revolutionizing the way music is written, produced, mixed, recorded, and creatively imagined."

Check it out, all the details are in an official Grammy press release; come February 26th (the day before the big Grammy shindig), Apple will receive its award alongside its co-honoree Robert Moog, otherwise known as Mr. Synthesizer. In suitably gushing fashion (this is about an award, after all), the press piece goes on about "the Mac's user-friendly interface," the way it's "linking technology to the creative process," and how it "became the touchstone of a new model for producing recorded music" by "literally changing the face of the recording studio." (If you think the acceptance speeches are long-winded, you've clearly never read the press releases before.)

Congrats to Apple, then, for securing its place on the recording industry's Wall of Honor. Now all Apple needs to do is score a Tony award for Steve Jobs's one-man Broadway show "I'll Park Wherever I Damn Well Please," and the company will have an entertainment award hat trick going on. Meanwhile, we imagine that Mike Dell is off buying himself a couple of Golden Globes even as we speak...