Whew, we're back! Trust us, it ain't all beer and skittles; when you're trying to produce a daily soap opera while living out of a suitcase in an unfamiliar land, Macworld Expo is an overall positive experience, but an extremely challenging one-- and that's not even counting the herculean task of lugging ninety pounds of AtAT t-shirts across Manhattan during the midday traffic snarl. Still, we were thrilled to get to meet so many of you in person (and take your money). Indeed, three days of chatting merrily with AtAT viewers and doling out shirts was almost enough idyllic pleasantness to erase the baffling and vaguely surreal memory of Jon Rubinstein lecturing us on processor design.

If you tuned in to watch the keynote, you already know what we're talking about: in lieu of having gigahertz Power Macs ready to ship, Uncle Steve brought out Apple's senior veep of hardware to bludgeon the audience with six and a half solid minutes on why clock speed isn't a valid measure of a processor's overall performance. Dubbed "The Megahertz Myth," Jon's informative presentation is now available online to those of you who just can't get enough processor design theory. As for us, last Wednesday morning we suddenly found ourselves flashing back to college, when we slept through similar lectures on the subject on an alarmingly frequent basis. Frequency? Pipeline stages? Cache design? Yikes-- that stuff couldn't keep us awake even when we were paying twenty grand a year to hear about it.

We'd like to think we're in the minority, there, but judging from the glazed looks on the faces of the fellow keynote attendees around us, Jon's presentation might more appropriately have been titled "How To Kill A Keynote's Momentum In Seven Minutes Or Less." Not that he didn't do a good job, mind you, because we happen to think he summed up the complexities of chip design admirably well for a nontechnical audience; it's just that throngs of people anxious to find out if Steve's "one more thing" is an LCD-based iMac or an Apple handheld (or, heaven forbid, a sequel to iDVD that's not due out for another two months) just weren't in the right frame of mind for a lecture on the latency with the instruction branches and the hey hey hey and the pipeline glavin. Chalk it all up to timing.

Now that you're entirely out of Keynote Hype mode, though, you may want to take another look at Jon's little spiel, because it's actually a nice clear demo of why the G4 is (in at least some cases) demonstrably faster than a Pentium 4 with twice the clock speed. Of course, it's not enough to convince a Macworld audience of that fact; we're already buying Macs. It's the Unwashed Wintel Heathens that need a little schooling, which is why we find ourselves hoping against hope that Apple will put up massive window displays in all of its retail stores that say, "An 867 MHz Mac Is Faster Than A 1.8 GHz Pentium 4? Come In And See!" In addition to the canned Photoshop and video-encoding bake-offs, why not have a Power Mac and a similarly-configured Wintel running on the sales floor, loaded up with similar applications so customers can see for themselves? (Unless Apple's chicken, of course.)

By the way, for those of you who couldn't make it to the Expo and are anxious to transform your torsos into walking AtAT ads by donning garments emblazoned with our cryptic yet striking logo (we actually sold a few shirts to people who had never even heard of the show, but just liked the shirt design!), hang in there. We expect to have an online order form available sometime in the next few days. In the meantime, keep studying that chip design, because there will be a quiz.