If there's any one psychologically self-destructive behavior that's endemic to Mac fanatics, we'd have to assume it's the process of building up one's hopes regarding a future product's release date, only to see those hopes get sledgehammered into smithereens again and again. Witness Wall Street. Witness Lombard. Witness the iBook and the new PowerBook (formerly known as P1 and Pismo). Then there's the mythical Apple-branded Palm device, now expected by July's Macworld Expo. And where clock speeds are concerned, boy howdy, we've sure gotten burned on that front; 500 MHz G4s didn't become available until almost six months after they were announced. But still we get our hopes up time and time again, always so sure that the Next Big Thing™ is right around the corner. Fun, isn't it?

So it's time to play again! Do you suffer from the heartbreak of Gigahertz Envy? Are you frustrated that the fastest, most expensive Mac you can buy today has a clock speed that's just half that of the speediest processors available from Intel and AMD? Well, stop worrying, because, as always, the Next Big Thing for Mac users is-- you guessed it-- right around the corner! According to a MacUser UK article, that G4e chip we've all been waiting for will hit production-level yields by "October or November." What's that mean for us Mac fans? Well, it means that we could see a Power Mac G4 running at 800 MHz by the end of this calendar year. And more importantly, since the G4e uses much less power than the current G4 (and might be "even cooler than the current G3"), we may well see a PowerBook G4 by then as well. So start trying to get on Santa's "nice" list. In fact, get ready to watch the Mac break through the 1 GHz barrier by this time next year-- a mere solar year behind the competition, as far as raw clock speed is concerned. Optimistically speaking.

And now that we've built up some hopes (!), it's time to smash apart some others. The same article claims that "it appears that May's Worldwide Developer Conference will not, as predicted, see the debut of any new hardware." Oh, well... It's certainly not like MacUser is the end-all be-all when it comes to setting Apple release dates. Feel free to cling to hopes that something as out-of-place as the fabled 17" iMac will still surface at, of all things, a developers' conference. We know we will.