Still waiting for that dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 you ordered about fifteen milliseconds after they appeared at the Apple Store? Get in line, pal. Oh, wait-- you placed your order, so you already are in line. Never mind. Well, don't fret, because Apple promised to start shipping the metal beasties before the end of this month, and we're sure the company is playing completely fair and fulfilling orders on a first-come, first-serve basis. You'll be cranking nine fans across four cooling zones before you know it.

Just as soon as all the schools get theirs, that is.

That's right; Think Secret reports that, when it comes to prioritizing dual G5 shipments, education buyers get frontsies! "The initial supply of dual processor G5s will be allocated primarily to education orders so we can meet back to school deadlines," explained Apple to its increasingly-antsy resellers. Which hardly seems fair, because if anyone should be intimately aware of the international "No Frontsies" rule, it should be our nation's schools. Back-to-school, shmack-to-school-- what kind of example are we setting for our children by allowing this sort of behavior?

Still, we suppose we understand; not shipping education customers their G5s before the beginning of the school year wouldn't be the best way to encourage future purchases-- and when it comes to clinging to education market share, Apple needs all the help it can get. The long and the short of it is, the schools get their G5s tout de suite so Apple can "favorably influence additional sales," while the rest of you poor G5-waitin' shmoes get to twiddle your thumbs a little while longer 'cause ya gots no juice.

So, you'll be waiting just a smidge longer than you otherwise would have for your new aluminum powerhouse, but look on the bright side: at least this means that some schools are actually still buying Macs-- and not just cheapo eMacs, either, but big, hulkin' Power Macs to tower over the students and fill them with awe, reverence, and not just a little bit of fear. (We assume that most of these education-purchase Power Macs are destined for universities, because we're reasonably certain that blasting a grade-school kid through a couple of walls and into a tree would run afoul of child endangerment laws. Or at least local zoning regulations.) And here's hoping that a little taste of G5 power will hook some of these poor, unsuspecting students for life. Hey, it's almost like a sales strategy or something!

By now everyone's sick to death of all that "Apple cheated on the G5 benchmarks" / "No they didn't" hoo-haa. (Well, everyone but The Register, apparently; faithful viewer David Poves notes that they appear to be reporting on the original Apple-published benchmarks now, despite the fact that those numbers have been around since June. Let's do the Time Warp again!) Our final word on the subject was essentially that everyone should wait until the real, honest-to-Steveness production G5s hit the streets, and then we'd all see some real performance tests start to emerge. Well, guess what? The G5s are a-hittin' and the tests results are emergin'. Unfortunately, at first glance, they aren't exactly the sort of numbers to swoon over.

Let's say you flat-out ignored the first public batch of owner benchmarks, which surfaced last week over at Mac Rumors, on the grounds that they showed the G5's XBench scores barely edging out the G4's-- even after XBench had been tuned for improved G5 performance-- and therefore "couldn't be right." Okay, fine. So you decided to wait for a reasonable real-world benchmark, preferably a cross-platform one that was optimized for every processor on which it was run. Sounds like Photoshop to us! And guess what? Mac Rumors now has preliminary PS7Bench results for the G5 as well. If you're expecting to get blown away, though, it might be best if you turn away now. We hate seeing looks of disappointment.

Don't get us wrong-- the results are okay, they just aren't astounding. A handy table of all results is available at Chaosmint.com, and while the G5 turns in some pretty respectable times, it just doesn't mop the floor with the other chips as Apple would have us believe. The G5 beat out all the x86 reference systems in only 5 out of 21 tests; the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 won 10 of the races. Granted, that doesn't mean much, so we added the times together and found that the G5 appears to have placed second to last out of seven systems, taking 180.1 seconds to complete the test battery, and finishing well behind (among other things) a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 (124.6 seconds), a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 (155.7) and an Athlon 2700+ (151.4).

There is a bright side, however, which is that the tested G5 was a 1.6 GHz model-- the entry-level Power Mac. Unfortunately, there's also a dark side to the bright side, which is that you can't spit without hitting a Wintel system with, say, a 2.8 GHz P4 that costs less than that entry-level Power Mac-- and that's with a 17-inch LCD display. On the lower end, at least, it's starting to look like the G5 isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. Ultimately, yes, benchmarks are artificial, but there's also anecdotal testimony floating around, like the words of a reseller quoted over at Accelerate Your Macintosh! who "can't say [he] see[s] a marked improvement in performance."

Our hope is that the dual 2.0 GHz G5 will show a clear performance lead at the top end, and that upcoming G5 optimizations in Panther and future releases of Photoshop only extend the G5's lead even further. Right now, though, we're definitely a little underwhelmed with the first sets of G5 benchmarks making the rounds. Perhaps the tester had the secret red toggle switch on the motherboard flipped to "SLOW"?

Conspiracy alert! Conspiracy alert! We have a Code 3 in progress! You may recall our previous conspiracy theory regarding the state of x86 emulation on the Mac: Microsoft buys the only usable such product (Virtual PC) from Connectix, and then ties up the release of the only viable competing product (RealPC) in legal red tape by issuing a cease and desist letter, thusly gaining 100% control-- temporarily-- over Mac users who need to run Windows applications. Thereafter Microsoft would be free to pull all sorts of icky moves-- say, killing the product entirely, thus further barring the Mac from increased corporate use, or ending Mac Office development on the premise that Mac users can just run the Windows version in emulation. But it goes so much deeper than that. Strap yourselves to something heavy, 'cause this is going to be a veritable whirlwind of paranoia.

Point of fact number one: gosh, the current version of Microsoft Virtual PC doesn't seem to run on the Power Mac G5! What an "embarrassing oversight" (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more)! Mac OS Rumors has quoted confirmation "direct from a Microsoft Support Professional," claiming that "large portions of the VPC for Mac program must be rewritten and carefully tested to work properly on the G5 CPU." Golly gee whiz, that's a darn shame, because that means that G5 owners won't be able to run Virtual PC until "well into 2004," and when they finally can run it, they're going to find its performance somewhat lacking. The reason, claims Microsoft, is that Virtual PC relies on a feature of the G3 and G4 called "pseudo little-endian mode", which boosts emulation performance, but allegedly can't be invoked on the G5. So it's clearly not Microsoft's fault.

Convenient, hmmmm? Especially since Microsoft bought Virtual PC way back in February, and there's no way you're going to convince us that the company never had access to a G5 until yesterday. To think that Microsoft simply never tested Virtual PC on a G5 is inconceivable; they must have known about this "issue," and yet they said nothing. As a result, Mac users who had visions of their new dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5s running Virtual PC as fast as a real Wintel were... well, they were right, sort of: on a G5, Virtual PC runs just as fast as a Wintel that's not running at all, which we're told isn't an altogether unusual occurrence.

The upshot of all this is that, for a while, at least, Apple's blazingly-fast new Mac isn't even an option for customers who need Virtual PC access, and even when a G5-compatible version becomes available, Microsoft has a convenient excuse ready for it to run at a snail's pace, thus ensuring that, from a Windows application standpoint, the Mac never becomes a feasible replacement for an actual Wintel PC. Meanwhile, Virtual PC is still for sale, in boxes conspicuously lacking a label that reads "WARNING: PURCHASE OF THIS PRODUCT FOR USE ON A G5 PROCESSOR WILL MAKE ALL OF US BACK HERE IN REDMOND SMIRK AND DO ONE OF THOSE 'DR. EVIL'-STYLE OMINOUS LAUGHS."

But that's okay, because surely whatever legal hassles that Microsoft threw at FWB to stall the release of RealPC for Mac OS X can't keep it off store shelves forever, right? Well, buddy, that may well be true... but we're pretty sure that the product's utter nonexistence can keep it off the shelves indefinitely. Point of fact number two: as called to our attention by faithful viewer Jack Pattishall, Jr., RealPC is now ReallyDiscontinued, with FWB's new management claiming that the company's previous bigwigs totally misrepresented the progress of development; instead of being in "late beta," reportedly RealPC's"development had not formally been started," and in fact FWB claims it doesn't even have source code upon which to base a port. That little setback has made the project "unattractive," and as such, it's been summarily canned.

But here comes that ol' skepticism again; isn't it odd that any and all mention of the original Microsoft cease and desist letter that delayed the release of RealPC has mysteriously evaporated from FWB's site? Now, skepticism cuts both ways-- it's certainly possible that the previous management lied about the existence of the Microsoft legal threat, too, to cover up the fact that FWB's "late beta" product wasn't going to ship for a good long while. But if that were the case, we would expect that Microsoft would have publicly denied ever having sent the letter to FWB in the first place; it was public knowledge, after all, and somehow we suspect that lawyers don't take kindly to people lying about their activities.

So the other explanation is that Microsoft engineered this whole thing-- the recent court-ordered change of management at FWB, the fabrication of the "RealPC OS X is vaporware" story (a stroke of genius, we might add!), and the subsequent cancellation of an almost-shipping product, all as part of its master plan to make its temporary stranglehold on Windows emulation on the Mac into a permanent one. Has anyone checked the new FWB management's bank records for any unusually large deposits lately?

Hey, wait a minute... these aren't Thorazine, they're Tic-Tacs!...