Oh, this just keeps getting better and better... Remember how yesterday we discussed Motorola's breathless announcement that, after a year of what we must assume was some seriously intense thumb-twiddling and navel-gazing (just kidding, folks!), that obstinate 500 MHz barrier had finally been broken? Well, the reaction from the Mac community, much to our surprise, was generally not one of unbridled joy and celebration; apparently the promise of 50 extra MHz (for a blistering total of 550 big ones) "soon" isn't enough for people who have watched that "other" processor architecture recently vault the 1.5 GHz hurdle. What can we say? Some ungrateful malcontents are never satisfied.

And evidently Motorola isn't digging the heat from megahertz-starved Mac loyalists who are lambasting the company with a severity normally reserved for child molesters, nursing home arsonists, and spammers. Get this-- as we first noticed in an article over at MacSlash, the company has actually revised its own press release (yes, the same one we referred to yesterday) to remove any and all mention of the new 550 MHz G4. Vanished. Gone. Just like that. If you blinked, you missed it-- and they didn't even bother to change the date of the release. We figure this is some sort of way of saying "hey, if you spoiled brats aren't going to appreciate all our hard work, then we'll just take our ball and go home." Yes, kiddies, Motorola has turned the car around and is taking us all home right now.

Of course, it's possible that the removal of the G4/550 was not a form of punishment, but rather the correction of an honest mistake. Perhaps someone in Motorola's PR department got a little overzealous in crafting the press release, and in fact the G4/550 isn't expected "soon" at all. Heck, we'd even consider the possibility that the G4/550 was never mentioned in the press release in the first place, and that it was all a mass hallucination brought on by prolonged megahertz deficiency-- except for the fact that we've still got a copy of the original statement in our disk cache. Or did we add in the bit about the G4/550 ourselves, in a megahertz-deprived trance? And what if we're all just characters in some Motorola executive's dream-- what happens when he wakes up? Or maybe our whole universe is just, like, a single atom in the toenail of some Motorola supreme being. Ooooooo.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: officially speaking, there's no longer any reason to expect a G4/550 anytime "soon." But that's okay, because honestly, we've been maxed out at 500 MHz for so long, anything faster in the Mac world would be downright unsettling. There's something to be said for the comfort afforded by consistency. (And rationalization's always good, too.)