We all whined like babies for a year while the G4 languished at 500 MHz and Intel zipped onward to 1 GHz and beyond. "Why can't Motorola do that?" we moaned. Sure, we knew that clock speed alone is a fairly meaningless measurement of a processor's overall performance, but the bottom line is, the Unwashed Masses look at megahertz when shopping for one o' them thar "personal computers," and Apple was getting the tar beat out of it when shoppers did a price-per-megahertz comparison. Plus there's the whole issue of bragging rights. What with the G4's supercomputer-level performance, we knew we had the power; now we wanted the clock cycles to back it up.

Well, we took a quantum leap forward in the clock speed department this year, when Apple introduced the Power Mac G4 running at 733 MHz. But now that those oh-so-zippy machines are finally shipping, people have had a chance to take them for a spin-- and not everybody is happy about what they're finding. According to Mac OS Rumors, "the numbers so far do look bad." Whatever architectural changes that Motorola added to the G4 in order to boost its clock speed also seem to have reduced the performance-per-cycle significantly in some situations. In theory, the 733 MHz G4+ ought to run rings around a 533 MHz G4 in pretty much any scenario-- but reportedly sometimes the 533 MHz chip comes out ahead.

While we hope this is just a temporary anomaly that'll vanish once Apple's operating systems are further optimized for the new chips, we can't help but wonder if Motorola finally buckled under the pressure and followed in Intel's footsteps: higher clock speeds, no matter what. Remember, people, a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is slower than a 1 GHz Pentium III in certain scenarios; doesn't this whole G4-vs.-G4+ thing sound eerily similar? We'll reserve final judgment until some benchmarks appear under Mac OS X, but we're starting to worry that when we clamored for "higher clock speeds at any cost," Motorola took us seriously.