Another day, another 24 hours stuck at 500 MHz. It's like we're all doing time in the Half-Gigahertz County Correctional Facility, marking the days on the wall with a crayon. If you want to get more extreme, let's say the Mac's on death row and waiting for a pardon from the governor-- in the form of a press release announcing a clock speed increase to get back into the game. These days we're finding the wait all the more galling, because the lull in Apple-related news means there are fewer distractions from the fact that the PowerPC is, developmentally speaking, just sitting there... at least from a user's perspective. And without insider knowledge, we're all just sitting in the Clock Speed Big House-- playing the harmonica, yelling at the screws, and fashioning hand-made shivs out of bedsprings.

Luckily, though, the kind folks at Mac OS Rumors have come to visit with news from outside. It's a longish (but extremely interesting) report, so here are the juicy bits: 1) as widely expected, 600 MHz dual-G4 Power Macs at January's Macworld Expo; 2) Power Macs with 733 MHz G4e processors "by April or early May 2001," probably alongside Mac OS X 1.0; 3) 800 MHz to 1 GHz G4e processors in "mid to late 2001"; and 4) quad-processor Power Macs next year after Mac OS X's release, probably at Macworld Expo NYC in July. So if you're the sort who puts a lot of stock in rumors, you can look forward to some real progress next year.

Now, we're sure there are those of you who are gnawing your own arms off over the fact that even if Apple does follow the timetable reported at MOSR and ends the year-long drought by shipping a 600 MHz dual-G4 system in January, the Mac will still be at least 900 MHz behind the competition. Well, what did you expect? At this point we think it's safe to say that even if someone caffeinates Motorola's water supply and sets its butt on fire, the company is never going to crank the PowerPC's clock speeds up to Intel's levels-- at least, not before our grandkids die of old age.

But a 100% increase in clock speed within the coming year, plus spiffy performance-boosting advances in the upcoming UMA-2 motherboard architecture, plus a symmetrically-processing, Altivec-enhanced operating system, plus dual- and quad-processor Macs adds up to what we expect will be a ridiculous amount of real-world speed-- possibly far, far better than anything the Wintel world can scrape together. On top of that, if you believe the reports that for many uses the 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is slower than a 1 GHz Pentium III (and doesn't yet support multiprocessing), you can take solace in the knowledge that while the G4 hasn't gotten any faster in a year or so, at least it's not slowing down. So let's wait a couple more months and see what happens. C'mon, after the past year in the joint, you can do that time standing on your head.