If you just emerged from a five-year-long coma, allow us to fill you in on a few surprises. First of all, the Macarena did not make the leap from international dance fad to enduring and timeless art form. Secondly, "The Single Guy" got cancelled. (We know, we were as shocked as you are.) And lastly, remember how the PowerPC's superior RISC architecture was eventually going to bury Intel's aging x86 platform? Well, we recommend that you be sitting down when you take a look at the relative clock speeds of Macs and Wintels currently available. And maybe have some Tums handy.

Now, before you panic, it's important to keep in mind that clock speed is just one part of the performance equation, and Apple has demonstrated that at some tasks, an 867 MHz PowerPC G4 (yes, we're up to G4s now) will whip the silicon pants off of a 1.8 GHz-- uh, that's "1800 MHz" for the coma survivors-- Pentium 4. Apple is even making tentative moves towards countering the "Megahertz Myth" by educating the unwashed masses to the fact that clock speed isn't everything. Still, if you're like most people, you're having a teensy bit of trouble getting past that whole "more than twice the frequency" thing, and we don't blame you. So why isn't Apple working harder to get the word out about the Megahertz Myth?

Well, it could just be a return to the classic ineffectual Apple marketing of old, but we doubt it; believe it or not, Apple has actually made great strides in advertising since '96. Yet aside from the traditional PPC-vs.-Intel "bake-off" demos at every Macworld Expo (which is the very definition of "preaching to the converted"), the company hasn't really torn into the whole clock speed issue in a way that might reach the average shmoe. If Mac OS Rumors is correct, though, that might all be part of Apple's Grand Scheme for Planetary Domination.

As faithful viewer Paul Ferro pointed out, MOSR now has more preliminary info on the next major PowerPC revision: the 64-bit G5, which may ship as early as the beginning of next year. Meanwhile, Intel's new 64-bit chip architecture the Itanium, is the official "Day Late, Dollar Short" poster chip. It may be fast overall (actually, we hear it really isn't), but since it's only currently available in 733 and 800 MHz flavors, while the company's older Pentium 4 runs a full gigahertz faster, Intel's the one that's going to have to start countering the Megahertz Myth pretty soon if it ever wants to sell Itaniums. So Apple's wise to wait and let Intel do the heavy lifting.

More importantly, though, by the time the G5 ships, it'll reportedly be running at no less than 1.2 GHz itself, while the Itanium probably won't have hit 1 GHz yet. In that case, the Megahertz Myth will suddenly start to work in Apple's favor-- and people who actually do the research and compare real-world performance will still wind up seeing that the Mac is faster. Of course, Intel is flat-out stating that the Itanium will never replace the 32-bit Pentium family, claiming that "the IA-32 architecture has a strong future roadmap and will continue to provide value to its target market segments." (In other words, "We're going to keep selling the P4, because who's going to want to buy an 800 MHz chip? Other than Mac people?") In that case, Apple will likely still be competing against the Pentium 4-- but at least then, the company will be able to leverage the 64-bit vs. 32-bit thing. Why wouldn't that sway the average consumer? After all, it's twice as many bits!