Meanwhile, the true Mac geeks of the world were less fazed by last week's earnings warning than by Motorola's status in the Megahertz Wars. The fact that the company's G4 processor tops out at 500 MHz while the competition has at least announced chips running at three times that frequency leaves us with an unshakable image of German tanks rolling into Poland in 1939. Last week's drama-- in which Motorola announced a 550 MHz G4 coming "soon" and then promptly edited its press release to remove any mention of that 550 MHz chip-- did little to put anyone's mind at ease.

Faced with a marketing handicap that would make even P.T. Barnum wet his britches in fear, Apple's only recourse was to stick two G4s into every high-end Power Mac. There are a few problems with this approach, however... for one thing, back when Intel and AMD were slugging it out over 1 GHz, two 500 MHz G4s may have seemed like a reasonable alternative, but now that 1.5 GHz is the speed to beat, we expect Apple's going to have to leap right ahead to quad-G4 boxes to compete. Mac OS Rumors claims that the company's going even farther-- how's the prospect of eight G4s grab ya? Or four inside the egg-shaped shell of an iMac? There's even talk of dual-processor PowerBooks and iBooks now that Motorola's new low-power 7410 G4 chip is out. (Disclaimer: we here at AtAT no more believe that Apple will ship eight-processor Macs in the next year than we believe that MTV will soon start airing old episodes of "Hee Haw" -- but hey, anything's possible.)

Of course, the other teensy little problem is that right now, most people may as well yank out those extra processors and use them as decorative paperweights, because the Mac sure isn't using them. As most of you are aware, Mac OS 9 only uses one chip-- and unless the Mac is running an application that was specifically written to use additional processors (such as Photoshop), the extras are just dead weight right now. Mac OS X is supposed to change all that, of course, but realistically, it's not going to ship until perhaps next May. Until then, it's true that we do have the public beta... but as faithful viewer Jens Baumeister reveals, some of those who expected Apple's first public release of Mac OS X to unleash their dual-processor systems' full potential are finding out the true meaning of the word "beta."

See, instead of using both processors, apparently sometimes the public beta prefers to use neither instead. We've been hearing the occasional complaint from owners of dual-G4 Macs who have been completely unable to get the public beta to install on their systems at all. This problem doesn't afflict every dual-G4 Mac, but for those it does, as Jens points out, one reader over at MacInTouch found a workaround: turn off the second processor. No joke! Booting into Open Firmware and setting the number of CPUs to "1" allows the public beta to install and run on certain dual-processor Macs that otherwise fail. Apple is "actively working on a fix," but in the meantime, it looks like Mac OS X's promise of symmetric multiprocessing is a hit-or-miss proposition. Hopefully Apple will have that whole thing ironed out by the time that thirty-two-processor Cube hits the shelves.