Since it's one painfully slow news week-- both MacMinute and MacCentral are on vacation, neither Mac OS Rumors nor AppleInsider has stirred since last week, and our Christmas wish for reports of a nude Steve Jobs wearing nothing but a pair of plush reindeer antlers running through the streets of downtown Cupertino while belting out the dirty version of "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" remains sadly ungranted-- we figured we'd just drop you folks a line about the new addition to our Mac family. As some of you may recall, two weeks ago we drove for four hours in the rain to pick up a custom-configured Power Mac G4 from our friends at Diversified Computers. We then promptly left it boxed up in the AtAT basement for a week while holiday responsibilities monopolized our time.

Well, last Friday we had finally sent out all the cards and wrapped and shipped all the presents-- all the ones that had even a ghost of a chance of arriving in time for Christmas, at any rate. Toss in a four-day weekend and the fact that seven days in the box after being purchased is precisely the right amount of fermentation for a high-end Mac to reach its optimal flavor, and we knew it was time to set that puppy up. We're just here to let you know that, in our experience, at least, the Apple out-of-box experience is still tops. We pulled everything out of the cartons, carried it to the main production studio, plugged it all in, and with a minimum of fuss, we were soon off and running.

And let's be clear about this: when we say "running," we're not talking about a leisurely jog or a modest canter-- we're talking about Flash-style, around-the-world-in-eight-seconds, super-human sprinting. After living for almost five years with a PowerTower Pro (whose 200 MHz 604e admittedly seemed pretty darn fast way back in early '97), we feel it's worth mentioning that piloting two 800 MHz G4s under Mac OS X 10.1.2 feels like riding a bullet train with a warp drive strapped to its butt-- especially since the new AtAT production system also has 1.5 GB of RAM and a GeForce 3 graphics card. (Are we gloating? Well, yes. But you should let us, because in just over a week, this Mac will utterly cease to be the fastest one out there. For the money we paid, we figure we're allowed a couple of weeks' worth of bragging rights.)

On a serious note, though, now that we've used a dual-800 MHz G4 with a Cinema Display for a week, we finally "get" what Apple's doing with Mac OS X. We found the operating system nice but quirky and kind of clunky on our 400 MHz Pismo PowerBook; our new G4, on the other hand, fits Mac OS X like a glove. Everything responds instantly. The Genie Effect actually works, and smoothly, too. Stuff that looked slightly cramped even on a 1024x768 screen suddenly look just right at 1600x1024. In other words, Mac OS X is very much an operating system of the future-- a future when even the $799 iMac ships with a couple of G4s and a 22-inch screen. And we've no doubt it'll grow into itself soon enough.

Oh, and by the way-- while getting actual work done on a fast, modern system is sheer joy, we'd like to add that running the Cocoa version of Oni at 1600x1024 with all options turned on and nary a performance stutter ranks right up there on the giggle scale, too...