Many of you have been wondering just how the AtAT staff has managed to remain as calm as we have, given the fact that our dual-800 MHz Power Mac G4-- mere weeks ago, the absolute pinnacle of Macdom-- is now no longer the fastest Mac available. The answer is simple: there's no unpleasant situation that can't be improved with a heaping helping of good old fashioned denial. Motorola finally shipped a 1 GHz PowerPC chip? Shyeah, right... next thing you'll be telling us that the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Pull the other one.

Of course, another helpful tactic has been focusing in on the graphics performance of the new systems versus that of the primary AtAT workhorse. Sure, the nVIDIA GeForce4 MX sounds new and sexy, but Accelerate Your Mac! revealed that the GeForce3 in our own beloved Power Mac is actually faster at pumping out those polygons. So we got to cling to that little shred of comfort as we slowly came to terms with the fact that, let's face it, processor-wise, our former Tower of Power is now little more than a rapidly depreciating doorstop well on its way to full-on dinosaur status. (Pardon us while we breathe into a paper bag for a minute.)

Ha ha, no, we're just being silly; obviously we'll be able to derive many weeks' worth of Mactastic enjoyment from our now hideously unfashionable dual-800 MHz rig. Especially since our GeForce3 will continue to wipe the floor with what's in the newer Macs... well, for another month, anyway. Faithful viewer Lonnie Robinson summarily shattered whatever illusions we managed to cling to regarding superior 3D graphics performance when he informed us that Apple issued a press release announcing the impending availability of the GeForce4 Titanium as a build-to-order option.

Whereas the MX is a "basic" card, the Titanium is the real deal: 128 MB of DDR RAM on a 4x AGP card feeding a chip that can crank out 4.9 billion textured pixels per second-- four to five times as fast as the MX model, and, we assume, a fair margin faster than our own GeForce3. Plus, if you're willing to shell out extra for a DVI-to-ADC converter, apparently you can plug two Apple displays into this thing at once and feed them both digitally, without having to resort to using a VGA port. In other words, in a month even our graphics card won't be king of the hill anymore, and therefore we'll have to take our own lives in shame.

Or maybe not. It appears that we can postpone throwing ourselves under a bus for at least another day, because faithful viewer Coxi just noticed that Apple's press release has been recalled: "We are advised by Apple Computer Inc. that journalists and other readers should disregard the news release... as it contained some erroneous information." (Just to unnerve you still further, the recall notice has the words "KILLKILLKILL" plastered across the top. Yeesh-- point taken, guys.) There's no clue as to what the "erroneous information" might be, but if you wander over to nVIDIA's site, there's a conspicuous lack of GeForce4 info, and a teaser hinting at a big product intro on February 6th-- tomorrow.

Whoops! Looks like Apple jumped the gun a little with that press release. Suppose this little error might make Steve a bit more understanding about when ATI did the same thing to Apple a year and a half ago? All we can say is, now that half of Apple's products rely on nVIDIA technology, here's hoping that nVIDIA doesn't hold grudges like Steve is rumored to do...

Okay, so lots of customers who ordered a G4 iMac within, say, the first eight seconds that they were available at the Apple Store are now happily clicking away at their shiny new systems. However, most of those systems arrived a little bit later than anticipated; we've heard complaints from folks who forked out the extra dough for overnight shipping, only to discover that their iMacs wound up getting stuck in customs in Anchorage, Alaska pending inspection by the United States Food and Drug Administration. And no, it's not just insane and delusional AtAT viewers reporting this surreal development; the presumably sober readers of MacMinute and MacInTouch confirm that the FDA was grounding iMacs in Alaska. Go figure.

Now, longtime viewers may find something eerily familiar about this whole scenario-- probably because the exact same thing happened almost precisely a year ago when the first titanium PowerBook G4s started to ship. At the time, Federal Express was explaining to antsy TiBook customers that the FDA was involved because it had "jurisdiction over electronic products using lasers," which sounds plausible, if not still a little goofy. And so just as vast quantities of TiBooks were sitting idle in Anchorage a year ago, being nibbled at by moose as the FDA took its own sweet time inking up its "These Lasers Aren't Powerful Enough To Be Used In An Orbiting Doomsday Satellite" rubber stamp, this time around it was scads of iMacs feeding the local fauna.

Ah, but was it really concerns about the lasers that had the FDA gumming up the works, or was that just a convenient excuse? Faithful viewer Chris Merkling was distressed to discover that his local CompUSA still doesn't have any new iMacs, and one of the employees imparted an interesting reason why: "They're having trouble getting them through customs because everyone wants to stop and see it."

Normally we'd rate the reliability of this sort of information pretty low on the Universal Scale of Truth-- particularly coming from the average CompUSA employee, who would probably have no more reason to know why iMacs are moving so slowly through customs than he or she would know why Alaskan moose find titanium and shiny white plastic so gosh-darn tasty. But we have to admit, shipments delayed while throngs of bureaucracy rubberneckers play with the cool new equipment actually sounds more plausible than some FDA guy inspecting the Macs to make sure no Death Rays come shooting out of the optical drive when the system is poked at with a stick. Heck, we once almost missed a flight because the airport security guys started playing "Beavis & Butthead" on our Sega Game Gear.

So there you have it: if your iMac was late, blame it on the FDA and the irrepressible urges of its employees. And if anyone happens to notice that their new iMac's browser cache mysteriously includes code and graphics from sites like "Bureaucratic Vixens" and "Randy Regulatory Romps," well, we'll take that as confirmation.