Has anyone noticed that whining about the clock speed deficit has fallen out of fashion in the Mac community of late? After being stuck at 500 MHz for about a year and a half, we hardly expected that a boost to 733 MHz would quiet the career complainers, especially since the competition is already running at over twice that speed, and word has it that a 1.7 GHz Intel chip is just weeks away. Why the sudden lack of indignant megahertz outrage that was once such a staple of the Mac pessimist's diet?

Perhaps it's because Motorola's ongoing painful layoffs have inspired a certain level of sympathy. Maybe it's because once the economy tanked, consumers weren't buying computers anyway, so clock speed comparisons are sort of moot. Or maybe the loudest complainers are too busy yammering on about Mac OS X's sizeable list of shortcomings to be bothered with last millennium's problems. We don't know. We're just revelling in the comparative silence.

Interestingly enough, it's into this apparent vacuum of clock speed concern that Mac OS Rumors dishes some dirt on the PowerPC's Next Big Thing™: the G5. Remember, the G4's been available for almost two years now, and even Motorola doesn't sit still that long. According to MOSR, the 64-bit G5 (known to non-slangy types as the PowerPC 7500) is still at least a year away, but when it finally ships, it'll be the first "completely new" chip architecture to grace the Mac platform in years. We're talking deeper pipelines, silicon-on-insulator technology, full backwards-compatibility, multi-core capabilities, and a .10-micron wiring process-- all of which adds up to a chip that'll debut at 1.2 GHz and should eventually reach speeds of up to 2 GHz.

Should you choose to accept that rumor as fact, you may be feeling all warm and sunny inside. We feel it's worth pointing out, however, that if the proposed timetable is accurate, Macs may not see 1.2 GHz (in other words, 300 MHz less than the fastest Wintels available right now) for another year. It'll be quite a bit longer before we hit 2 GHz, while, according to The Register, Intel will be shipping a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 by the end of this year. We fully expect clock speed boosts in the G4 long before the G5 shows up, but we doubt it'll get much above 1 GHz. All of which means, of course, that by the time Apple smooths out most of Mac OS X's rough edges, we can all fall back on clock speed complaints to satisfy our need to whine incessantly. Woo-hoo!!