Holy Hannah-- just when we were beginning to lose all hope, faithful viewer Greg Roberts confirms that Mac OS Rumors is back! Well, sort of. The site is at least finally reachable, and serving up real English words and sentences. There is, however, no new actual dirt (though that's supposed to be remedied shortly), and more worrying is the baffling array of time and date stamps present on the home page. Supposedly the site was last updated on "Monday, December 18th, 6:14 PM EDT," which is startlingly wrong on a number of levels: it appeared hours before 6:14 PM Eastern, "EDT" designates Daylight Savings Time which isn't observed in winter, and today just happens to be Monday the 17th-- the next Monday, December 18th doesn't occur until 2006. But we're sure the MOSR team will eventually find a way to negate the effects of Apple's Time Distortion Ray and get back to the industrial-strength dirt-dishing long before the next Macworld Expo.

We just hope it happens soon. We actually wandered over to MOSR in hopes of gaining some insight into potential delays which might derail the Power Mac G4/G5/G[whatever]'s widely-expected debut during next month's Stevenote. See, we were squarely on the "it's coming in January" bandwagon with the rest of you, but now we're not quite as certain. Surely you recall Apple's "Crystal Clear Savings" promotion, which grants customers up to $500 back by mail when they purchase a Power Mac G4 together with any Apple display? Well, faithful viewer Jared just noticed something interesting-- and a little unsettling-- about that sweet little deal: whereas it used to expire at the end of this year (i.e. about a week before the Expo), as of today it's suddenly been extended until January 31st, 2002.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it could imply that the new pro desktops aren't going to be ready in time for a January Expo introduction, and that Apple is now planning to hold off until February, possibly at the Tokyo Expo. On the other hand, since the promotion specifies the purchase of a 733, 867, or dual-800 MHz G4, it's still completely possible for Apple to introduce new G4s at higher speeds (or even G5s) without screwing up the promotion; it'll simply turn into a way to get the older machines out of the channel after the new systems are introduced, instead of before. Still, we could use a little reassurance, here... and since AppleInsider's return has so far turned out to be a single new article followed by two weeks of zilch, we're hoping that MOSR may be the one to provide it. Somebody set our minds at ease!