Another day, another Macworld Expo prediction-- and another harrowing brush with the supernatural. Regular viewers will recall that a couple of weeks ago, we tried our hand at the ancient art of hieroscopy, which is a more concise and vastly more pleasant way of saying that we attempted to foretell future events by poking around in a mass of rapidly cooling goat entrails. (Don't worry, folks-- no animals were harmed in the making of this TV show. It's amazing what they can make out of soy these days.) What the guts told us, as far as we could make out, was that when Steve does his thang a week from this Wednesday, the Power Mac G4 line would be the recipient of one hellacious speed boost; whereas the product currently tops out at 733 MHz, come July 18th, that formerly blistering speed would actually drop to the low end of the spectrum. Furthermore, those helpful entrails also hinted that the 1 GHz clock speed barrier would finally be shattered when Steve took the wraps off the new high-end machine.

Well, we were skeptical, and possibly rightly so-- because we've since been offered a retraction, of sorts. First, we just have to ask: do you have any idea how disturbing it is to be awoken at 3 AM by a pile of imitation goat intestines sitting on your chest and tapping you on the shoulder? All we can say is, it's a darn good thing that tangle of fake guts knew CPR, because otherwise the resulting infarction might've finished us off. Anyway, after checking our vital signs and fetching us a drink of water, the guts-- whose collective name is apparently "Lemmy"; go figure-- hit us with this interesting ton of bricks: "Hey, remember when I said the high-end G4 would hit 1 GHz? My bad. Sometimes I have trouble reading my own handwriting. As far as I can make out through the swirling mists of obscurity, in nine days, the top-of-the-line Power Mac will actually only be running at 866 MHz. But the low-end one will still be at 733 MHz, just like I said, and there'll be a mid-range system at 800 MHz as well."

Now, while 866 MHz sounded a lot more reasonable to our skeptical ears, the fact that Lemmy had already changed his story once hadn't exactly won our confidence. (Plus, there was the fact that he was a sentient pile of processed soy protein, and our parents had always taught us that such things aren't always to be trusted.) So we asked him if he was sure this time, and he said, "Oh, definitely. I even bet a fiver on it with my bookie. And the new iMacs aren't anything to write home about, either, by the way-- they aren't much different from what's out there now. Trust me, I have the specs straight from the restless ghost of Gil Amelio."

We were about to launch a zillion questions at Lemmy-- among them, "What do you mean the new iMacs aren't much different?", "You are aware that Gil is still alive, aren't you?", and "Are you related to that guy from Motörhead?"-- when he promptly disappeared in a puff of rationality. Was it all just a dream? The lingering soy aftertaste on our lips says no, though that might just be from last night's Meatless Zesty Italian Meatballs. In any case, conflicting rumor reports nine days before an Expo are par for the course, so we're always careful not to put too much stock in anything we hear these days; still, if you had your brain all set for gigahertz Power Macs, maybe you should consider ratcheting your expectations down a couple of notches, just in the interest of mental health.