Who says rumors never come true? Wrong people, that's who-- because praise Jobs and hallelujah, the optimists finally get their day (and they always knew it would happen sooner or later): as pointed out by faithful viewer Ahab, Apple proved the last-minute rumors true with a press release introducing the brand spankin' new 20-inch iMac, available right this very second at the online Apple Store, Apple's retail stores, and (if there are any left) maybe even at one or two Apple Authorized Resellers.

Now, we're going to go out on a limb and assume that most of the pessimism surrounding the 20-inch iMac rumors stemmed from a fundamental skepticism that Apple would ever have grafted such a large and high-quality display onto the company's consumer desktop system-- which we can totally understand, since the new iMac's 1680x1050 screen is apparently just a 20-inch Apple Cinema Display-on-a-Stick™. (Frankly, you can color us mildly annoyed that Apple's latest "Mac for regular folks" has a built-in LCD with a higher resolution than our original 22-inch Cinema Display, which was Apple's top-of-the-line professional display less than two years ago. Progress bites.)

When you think about it, though, the idea really isn't all that wacky. For one thing, the iMac isn't Apple's "cheap" Mac anymore, either; that distinction belongs to the eMac these days. And while it's easy to forget, scary as it may sound, the 20-inch Cinema Display is actually Apple's mid-range LCD these days, and it only costs $1,299-- so from a features-for-price standpoint, a $2,199 20-inch iMac is actually a pretty obvious addition to the product line.

Of course, price and features are one thing (well, okay, two things), but Newtonian physics is something else altogether. We were a little surprised to hear about a 20-inch iMac because that's a pretty mammoth screen to be supported by that "ultra-compact base"-- especially on a positionable articulated arm that allows the screen to be swiveled all over creation. Seriously, just look at the line-up; the original 15-inch model looks a little light on top, the 17-inch seems well-proportioned and all grown up, and the 20-incher looks so top-heavy that if you were to tilt the screen more than a couple of degrees from its locked and upright position it'd go pitching over sideways due to "balance issues."

We're sure that isn't actually the case, of course; rest assured that Apple found a way to stabilize the base while also preserving the new 20-inch screen's total range of positionable freedom. (Even with the rash of quality control hiccups in recent years, we're not yet ready to believe that Apple's QC staff could be comatose enough to ship iMacs that actually fall over.) We've scribbled a bunch of funny-looking Greek letters and random numbers on a blackboard and pretended to do the math, and as far as we can tell from our fake equations, in order to stabilize the 20-inch iMac's screen, Apple had to increase the weight of the base by approximately 600 pounds. That's a tricky situation, given how relatively small that base is and how much stuff is already crammed in there; Apple needed to find something incredibly dense to boost the weight of the base by 600 pounds without welding it to an unsightly external anvil or something.

Well, we've got an exclusive, folks: AtAT sources have done a little digging and discovered that the ultra-dense material Apple used to weigh down the 20-inch iMac's base is analyst Rob Enderle. Mystery solved. Now run right out and buy one of those suckers-- but bring a forklift to get it home. Or lift from the knees.

And hey, the 20-inch iMac wasn't the only rumored Mac to materialize today: in another press release, Apple invites us to say howdy to the new dual-processor 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5, which gives you two, two, TWO chips for the price of one! Or, actually, for the price of one and one twenty-fourth-- the single-processor model was $2399, if memory serves, and the new dualie is $2499. But wait! If you order in the next ten minutes, that extra Bennie buys you more than just a second processor; you also get a second independent 900 MHz frontside bus absolutely free! Operators are standing by. (Sorry, no C.O.D.'s.)

Other than tossing an extra processor and bus in the cabinet and jacking the price by a hundred clams, though, it's the very same G5-- only with new two-fisted kung fu action, which ought to provide a serious speed boost during certain compute-intensive activities. And while the price of the midrange system went up (and justifiably so), the sticker price of the entry-level model went down. A single-processor 1.6 GHz G5 will now set you back just $1,799 (down from $1,999), thus lowering the cheapest ticket on a G5 flight by two hundred smackers. Nice. The top-of-the-line dual 2.0 GHz model is the same as it ever was, however, which strikes us as a little odd, since the only difference between the new dual 1.8 and the dual 2.0 is the clock speed and a better graphics card in the high-end model. Aren't people going to balk at spending $500 for an extra 200 MHz (times two, we suppose) and a RADEON 9600 instead of a GeForce FX 5200?

Then again, maybe that's the point; if 2.0 GHz chips are scarce, Apple might as well push the 1.8s as a bargain ride to Dualtown. So the important thing to note, here, is that the cost of getting a single- or dual-processor G5 just dropped by $200 and $500, respectively, and with a little luck that'll grab the hearts, minds, and wallets of some of the geeks waltzing into the holiday shopping season concerned that they really just don't have enough credit card debt.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer Michael Svensson notes that Apple has completely overhauled its G5 Performance page to include the dual 1.8 GHz model in all speed comparisons-- and to drop those controversial SPEC scores that, if you subscribe to the theory that there's no such thing as bad press, grabbed Apple a whole lot of extra "unbad" attention since they were first posted. The speed charts now deal exclusively with real-world (cough) performance in Apple's pro target markets, so they cover stuff like Photoshop filters, real-time video playback and rendering, and DNA sequence matching-- and, of course, in all published cases, Pentiums, Athlons, and Xeons all get spanked so hard their butts break the sound barrier. Any bets on how long it'll take before the x86 world details how Apple cheated again? Tick... tick... tick...

Decisions, decisions... do we make this episode an Apple press release hat trick and yammer on about free G5- and Panther-optimized updates for Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, and Shake, or do we bail on the official word from Cupertino and go hunting for plot developments outside the sandbox? The pro app updates are big news, to be sure-- Shake renders 45% faster on a G5 than on a G4, DVD Studio Pro encodes video up to 55% faster, and Final Cut Pro can now play back "seven fully uncompressed standard definition video streams with real-time effects" on a dual G5 (as long as you've got an Xserve RAID)-- which means you can watch seven episodes of "Charles in Charge" at once while making Willie Aames look green like a cheesy Star Trek alien. Important stuff!

The thing is, though, those are all professional-grade applications, used by people with actual jobs-- whereas the latest marketing stats show that, as you'd expect, AtAT's audience consists almost exclusively of the unemployed and people living on disability. (Expect banner ads from correspondence schools and personal injury attorneys any day now.) Given that fact, we're going to have to pass on pro-app drama and instead go for the sure-fire ratings appeal of the alien autopsy vibe aimed squarely at our primary demographic. So grab the pork rinds and generic beer, you lugs, and ponder the eternal mystery of... PC Magazine's 20th Annual Awards for Technical Excellence! (You're supposed to hum the X-Files theme here.)

Why so spooky, you ask? Because, as pointed out by faithful viewer mrmgraphics, the winner in the Personal Computers category is none other than the Power Mac G5. Yes, PC Magazine chose a Mac as the best personal computer of the year. Which it is, of course-- nothing weird about that-- but the fact that PC Magazine thinks so (and admits it publicly) would have Mulder on the next flight out, if he weren't spending all his time these days investigating abandoned pets.

Still not weird enough for you? Then consider how PC Magazine calls the G5 a "dazzling display of disruptive technology and processor independence" that's both "commendably quiet" and "an important step forward in desktop computer technology." What's more, while the rest of the PC industry keeps harping on about how Apple's original G5 benchmarks were clearly the result of blatant underhanded cheating involving disabled Hyperthreading, nonproduction settings of processor registers, and enough steroids to vaporize the liver of a charging rhino, PC Magazine reports that the G5 "equaled or bettered the performance of Intel-platform machines" on "all-important graphics and content creation tests."

Score one for Apple-- and, of course, for whatever pod-based alien simulacrums are currently masquerading as the PC Magazine editorial board. Apple gets awards, the aliens get the delicious human flesh of the people whose form they've taken on after feasting; it's win-win, baby!