Are you one of those guys who was ranting wildly and foaming at the mouth about how unacceptable it is that Apple will only be at 600 MHz when the next Macworld Expo rolls around in a few weeks? If so, you might want to sit down, take a few deep breaths, and keep that prescription bottle within easy reach. Granted, you have a right to be upset, what with the x86 architecture partying down somewhere up at the 1.5 GHz mark while Motorola takes a year to ratchet us up to the awe-inspiring, mind-blowing clock speed of 600 MHz. Personally, though, we'd rather laugh wild amid severest woe than give ourselves a coronary over something as (let's face it) fundamentally meaningless as the Megahertz Wars... and if you're already chewing your own legs off over the whole 600 MHz thing, you're going to face a lengthy hospital stay if you put any stock into the latest dirt over at Mac OS Rumors.

See, a great many of us have taken the rumors of impending dual-processor 600 MHz Power Mac G4 systems as something approaching cold, hard fact, but it's not by any means etched in stone. Motorola hasn't announced anything. Apple hasn't announced anything. All of our expectations are based on a handful of dodgy rumors-- well, that and the seeming impossibility that even Motorola could be incompetent enough not to bring Apple to 600 MHz after so long a wait. But get this: according to MOSR, Apple is getting "nervous" about Motorola's ability to supply enough 600 MHz G4 processors to allow the announcement of the G4/600 at the show. In the unlikely event that Motorola doesn't come through with the goods, Apple may be forced to postpone the planned Stevenote introduction of the new 600 MHz model.

Now, before you put your fist through a wall, don't jump to the conclusion that this means we'll still be stuck at 500 MHz after Steve leaves the stage. Far from it! Because rumor has it that if, by some dark miracle, Motorola somehow surpasses even the wildest estimations of its capacity for inertia and can't score Apple the (relatively) good stuff, then Steve may instead announce an alternate speed bump of the top-of-the-line Power Mac-- to a record-breaking 533 MHz. (Listen! Hear that muffled "thud"? That's the sound of dozens of highly-strung Mac fans simultaneously keeling over with burst aneurysms.)

But fear not; the new Power Macs will still have plenty of other enhancements going for them, like faster memory, a faster graphics bus, and a RADEON graphics card. Surely those upgrades will overshadow any negative press about a mere 33 MHz speed increase after a full year's wait, right? Why, we bet Apple's stock will go through the roof! We can hardly wait for the 9th.