It's official! Well, no, okay, it's not official; in fact, it's not even "official," since we have neither a public statement from Apple nor a leak from an Apple employee in the know. But multiprocessor G4 Power Macs are coming soon, and we can say that with "a high degree of confidence." A few days ago AppleInsider predicted that dual- and quad-processor systems would premiere at WWDC on May 15th, and as the first honest-to-goodness rumor we'd seen in a long time, we pretty much took it as gospel right then and there. But we realize that not everyone out there in television land is as trusting as we are (skeptics!), so we're happy to report that Go2Mac dug up some actual evidence supporting the multiprocessor rumor. (Thanks to faithful viewer Carlos Santellanes for the find.)

In fact, it's the same old story: when you want to verify that Apple's got new products coming out shortly, ask someone with access to CompUSA's inventory system. Uncle Steve can tighten the screws in Apple headquarters all he wants, but no matter how leakproof Cupertino's Silicon Curtain becomes, CompUSA will continue to be the weak link in the chain of secrecy. Simply put, it leaks like a sieve-- one that's had the wire netting removed for increased throughput. See, any new products that CompUSA's going to sell have to be put into the company's computer system a couple of weeks before the gear actually shows up on store shelves. Why? Hey, do we look like experts on retail business practices? You may as well ask us why TV sets have "off" buttons. We haven't a clue. The important thing is, "sources" at CompUSA claim that a dual-G4 Mac is listed there in CompUSA's system, and that's good enough for us.

Sadly, there's no mention of a quad-processor G4 in Go2Mac's coverage, so AppleInsider may be wrong on that point, or perhaps Steve will introduce both models and say the dual is "available now" and the quad is due in three weeks. And while it's nice that Apple may soon be able to claim (however sketchily) that it's shipping a "1 GHz system" to combat the GHz processors available from Intel and AMD, the real hope this brings to the Mac community is this: If Apple can ship a pro system with two processors, then there's still a chance that someday it may once again ship a keyboard with two "command" keys. Hey, we can dream, can't we?

Correction: faithful viewers Chris Bucksath and Khaled Mohammad both pointed out that Apple's current USB keyboard does in fact have two "command" keys-- though it lacks two "option" and "control" keys. Our bad. Chalk it up to spending so much time on an iBook, whose lack of a second "command" key is possibly the worst thing about it (and that's really saying something). The other thing we really miss on the USB keyboard is the "end" key, though there is a "home," oddly enough.