Okay, forget 1998-- what do you want next Christmas? It's never too early to start dropping hints, you know, and if you write letters to Santa, we hear he looks smilingly on punctuality. Also, if you were more naughty than nice this year, you're going to want to make some serious New Year's resolutions in a few weeks, because the payoff could be huge if you can top Santa's "Nice" list in 1999. Mac OS Rumors has early details on next year's "Sawtooth" Macs-- the successors to the "Yosemite" machines due to debut next month at Macworld Expo-- and the initial specs are enough to make any self-respecting Mac fanatic drool like one of Pavlov's pooches when the dinner bell rings.

Here's a quick rundown of the more drool-worthy features... forget the G3, because the Sawtooth will use G4 processors running between 400 and 950 MHz on a 100 MHz or faster system bus. Since the G4 doesn't have the multiprocessing limitations of the G3, there will be multiprocessor Sawtooth boxes for those of you who need truly awe-inspiring power. Sawtooth will hold up to 2 GB of RAM and will use an even smaller hardware ROM than the iMac and Yosemite-- 512 KB down from 1 MB, meaning that just about all of the Mac OS will be loaded into RAM from the hard disk. And unless something better comes along, Sawtooth with use the same ATI RAGE 128 graphics processor used in Yosemite, but instead of residing on a 66 MHz PCI card, it'll come in the form of a 4x AGP card for better performance.

Then there are all the little goodies like gigabit Ethernet, DVD-RAM drives, something called a "Screamer" audio system, etc. Plus, remember that Mac OS X should be shipping by the time these puppies hit the shelves, so the innate speed of the PowerPC won't be hobbled by legacy system software. How'd you like to find one of those under the tree next year? "Dear Santa..."