And the gestalt backpedalling continues! We won't know if it's a Pismo-No-Show-induced dose of overcaution or an unfortunate true reflection of unfolding events until next week, but now AppleInsider has gone from "WWDC May Finally Yield Multiprocessor Power Macs" to "WWDC May Not Bring Surprises." Specifically, the latest dirt is that while Apple's reportedly got fully-functional dual-G4 systems running in its secret underground testing bunkers, it's the software that will likely prevent Steve from introducing these machines as actual, honest-to-goodness, "available now" products when he takes the stage in a few days.

See, Mac OS 9 is about as multiprocessor-capable as two bananas tied together with a length of twine, and Mac OS X is still many months away-- which means that, right now, two G4 chips wouldn't be of any more use than one for any software that hasn't been specifically engineered to harness the power of both processors. Evidently Apple doesn't agree with us that just pumping up some Photoshop benchmarks would be a worthwhile endeavor. While the software lab gremlins in Cupertino are busily trying to cram some basic multiprocessor support into Mac OS 9 itself (which would yield an across-the-board performance boost on multi-G4 Macs), that project's a bit behind schedule-- therefore, no new hardware next week. Sorry, kiddies, but them's the breaks... according to rumor, anyway.

But don't worry; Apple will at least demonstrate Mac OS X's upcoming multiprocessing capabilities; that much is a sure thing. Unless, of course, you see any reason not to trust Apple's own posted session schedules: "See how threading improves your application's performance on both Mac OS 9 and OS X, on uniprocessors today and multiprocessors in the future." (It's that "in the future" bit that bums us out, but hey, life's full of disappointment and misery.) Lucky attendees will get to "see demonstrations of how fast applications can go using Velocity Engine, [multiprocessing], and both together"; the rest of us, however, will have to wait until Apple finally ships those multiprocessor G4s. As for us, we're still keeping our fingers crossed for next week anyway. What the heck; optimism's free.