Well, the good news for you speed junkies is that Apple has finally introduced the blazingly fast Power Mac G5; the bad news is that it evidently only happened in a parallel dimension. Or possibly Germany. We're sort of unclear on the whole thing, actually, mostly because the only indication that this momentous event took place at all consists of a blurb in a German magazine, and one year of high school German is proving to be spectacularly unhelpful in figuring out just what the deal is. (We knew Herr Gast was lying when he said we'd derive real-world skills from his tutelage. Clearly he failed to reckon with an attention span deficit so profound it makes even a roomful of espresso-torqued toddlers with power tools seem focused by comparison.)

Even Babelfish is rather useless in this instance, since the text is rendered in a graphic, but we get by with a little help from our friends. Faithful viewer milchstrasse notes that the German site MACup posted a scan of the Tomorrow magazine article in question, and even tossed us a handy translation: "Computer manufacturer Apple breaks the sound barrier for fast computers. The new Power Mac G5, introduced at the Macworld fair beginning of January, now finally features a gigahertz processor. The powerpackage is produced in three possible models: with 1.2, with 1.4 and with 1.6 gigahertz." All of you who were banking on the G5 debuting this month, rejoice: your dreams have come true!

This whole G5 announcement has gotten remarkably little press attention, however, so we basically see two possibilities, here. One is that Apple attended some "Macworld fair" aside from the Expo within the last couple of weeks, unveiled some screaming new G5s, and forgot to tell anyone except the German "Internet lifestyle" magazine Tomorrow. The other is that this copy of Tomorrow fell through a wormhole from an alternate universe-- one in which Steve did roll out 1.6 GHz Power Mac G5s during the keynote. Interestingly enough, judging by the accompanying photo of the system, in that dimension Apple apparently feels that the best possible enclosure for such a groundbreaking new machine is the pre-Quicksilver Graphite tower design that originally debuted in September of 1999. But you know those alternate realities; they've got all sorts of zany ideas about fashion over there. Or maybe AlternaSteve is just harboring a really short nostalgia cycle.

One thing we know for sure, though, is that this couldn't be the result of a magazine sending its February issue to press sometime last year complete with content based entirely on unconfirmed rumors and wishful thinking in the hopes that reality just sort of falls into place. Heck, even in alternate realities, publishers are never that journalistically irresponsible, right?