Those of you who have lusted after the bit-crushing power of the G4 processor for years but find yourselves doomed always to lag a generation or two behind the Latest and Greatest, rejoice, for your salvation is at hand! Or almost at hand. Faithful viewer Justin informs us that Mac OS Rumors has the scoop on a new Mac prototype sporting all sorts of next-generation bells and whistles, like 200 MHz RAM, an 8x AGP slot, 800 Mbps FireWire, and-- hold onto your Altivec units-- an honest-to-goodness working G5 processor.

Yes, G5-- as in G4 + 1, or G3 + 2, or "your current rig suddenly feels very, very old and infirm." And when we say "working," we're using the loosest possible definition of the word, because reportedly the prototype crashes more often than a narcoleptic on Nyquil locked in a pillow factory. Still, this non-feature-complete, single-core, half-cache proto-G5 is at least a viable shadow of its future 64-bit self, and it is indeed capable of running Mac OS X, Photoshop, and a web browser in between frequent nosedives into crashville.

As for the clock speed, well, the G5 is designed with longer pipelines to allow higher megahertz ratings, but don't expect anything to make Intel's marketing gurus quake in their bunny suits just yet. Eventually the G5 may reach as high as 2 GHz, but this prototype is running-- er, crashing-- unstably at a "mere" 900 MHz. But don't lose hope entirely, because the aforementioned Photoshop and web browsing demos apparently took place at a very respectable 1.33 GHz, so Motorola could theoretically start cranking out 1333 MHz G5s tomorrow, provided Mac users don't mind rebooting every twelve seconds. (And at least we'd be rebooting at warp speed.) In short, it's not quite ready for prime time, but the G5 is definitely on its way.

All of which means, of course, that if you've been dying for a way to justify blowing the kids' college fund on a SuperDrive-equipped Power Mac G4/733 to replace your struggling G3 system, you now have all the ammo you need to craft an intricate bit of rationalization. After all, if the G5 is already at the prototype stage (yes, you should edit out that whole "rumored to be" qualifier when building your internal justification), then surely it's just around the corner as a shipping product. Therefore, you'd be saving money by scoring yourself a G4, since that's all but officially yesterday's chip. And you can't be expected to suffer with a G3 anymore, since the imminent advent of the G5 makes your existing system officially decrepit. Ta-daa! Now off to the Apple Store with you!