Okay, so Expo's finally over; it was a struggle, but your exhausted AtAT staff did in fact manage to crawl back to Boston before collapsing in a heap. In fact, we even managed to fix a few AtAT 2.0 bugs and answer a sizeable chunk of our email before falling unconscious and dreaming fever-dreams of tiny grey cubes chewing our legs off. (We're feeling much better now.) So at this time we'd like to address an issue that's been coming up over and over again: "After the keynote last week, why didn't you guys mention the dual-processor G4s?" Well, it's like this: AtAT only has limited airtime, and there was so much drama gushing out of that particular Stevenote, we simply couldn't tell you about everything. We stuck with what we considered to be the biggest news: the new Pro Mouse, the fall line of iMac colors, and the fact that the Cube really exists and isn't just a big fat hoax meant to make the rumors sites look like gullible morons.

But now that the show's over, we see no reason not to go back and discuss exactly why the dual G4 didn't make the cut for our Drama Top Three. After all, the idea is pretty revolutionary, if you think about it: Apple's two highest-end pro systems now come standard with dual processors, at no extra charge. No one else in the industry does that, as far as we know. It'd only be more remarkable if the $1599 unit went dual as well-- and we have a sneaking suspicion that the Power Mac will go exclusively multiprocessor early next year. What a great way to do an end-run around Megahertz Envy, right? At least for the pro desktop market.

But here's why we weren't quite as impressed as we maybe should have been: until the Mac OS gains symmetric multiprocessing capabilities, that second processor just isn't pulling its weight. Sure, if your applications are written to use the second chip, you're styling: pros who live and breathe Photoshop will definitely get their money's worth from Apple's new dual-processor systems, as Steve's on-stage demo proved. But until Mac OS X ships, at least in a public beta version, other non-MP-aware software won't even know that bonus processor's there.

And apparently we weren't the only ones who filed the MP G4 toward the back of the excitement rankings; according to CNET, most analysts weren't overly-impressed either, calling the advent of dual-processor G4s "just a marketing ploy." Now, we wouldn't go that far, since we did get to see a pre-release version of Mac OS X running on dual-G4 Macs, and it's like watching the Road Runner with a hotfoot on some serious amphetamines. Once Mac OS X hits the ground running, trust us-- those analysts will be singing a different tune, and it'll go something like this: "Marketing ploy? What marketing ploy?"

In the meantime, though, with the fastest shipping G4 chips running at merely 50% of the raw clock speed of the fastest shipping Intel/AMD processors, there's certainly something to the idea that Apple had to do something now to address the disparity. Marketing Boy Wonder Phil Schiller even tried to put a spin on the clock speed debacle, making this bold claim: "We're seeing megahertz increases, and we always will." Well, uh, yeah... but what Phil neglected to mention is where they're seeing them-- which just happens to be in Intel's press releases. The G4/500 was announced by Apple last August, didn't actually ship until February, and hasn't gone any higher since-- so we can't imagine where Phil's seeing these "megahertz increases" unless he's cruising, say, AMD's web site. But that's okay. Because if Mac OS X scales processor-wise as we think it will, we have just one thing to say: ship the beta, ship the final, and bring on the quad-boxes, baby...