Wow, just twelve more "it's after the 22nd, where are those stinking speed-bumped Power Macs?" messages (and yes, by an incredible coincidence, they've all been phrased exactly that way) and we'll qualify for federal bailout funds. Simmer down, people-- remember, MacMinute's exact words were that we'd see Power Macs with G4s running at up to 1 GHz "on Tuesday, January 22, or shortly thereafter"; your definition of "shortly" simply might be a little less relaxed than theirs. We can relate. Why, when we say we'll be at the restaurant at "eightish," that occasionally means "a quarter to nine" or "a week from Saturday" or "sometime in May." It's all a matter of perspective.

For what it's worth, though, MacUser UK was also expecting revised Power Macs to materialize yesterday, but according to faithful viewer Rob Picton, that august body is now reporting that the introduction was "delayed"; it seems that "factors had conspired against" yesterday's planned intro, and it doesn't take a Scooby-Doo to guess at the most likely reason: MacUser suggests that "the number of existing Power Macs that remain in the channel" might be prompting Apple to hold back on releasing the goods. Indeed, we took a peek over at MacMall and discovered that those folks appear to have just over 100 dual-800 MHz units in stock (not bad), 750 of the 867 MHz model (uh-oh), and 2600 733 MHz models rattling around in the warehouse (time to light a fire and collect the insurance).

Because of these various "factors," MacUser now reports that the new Power Macs won't see the light of day "until next week at the earliest," which means those of you hoping for something more significant than a little bump to 800 MHz/933 MHz/dual-1 GHz G4s might be able to rustle up a little optimism that Seybold will yield G5s or something similarly brain-melting. Personally, we're keeping our expectations low-- but mostly because we just can't see G5s shipping until later in the year at the earliest, and not because a fairly convincing-looking PDF containing new G4 specs allegedly appeared at one of Apple's semi-internal sites and vanished again shortly thereafter in a puff of "oops."

If you've come across this document (and you probably have, since faithful viewer Jeff Wiley tells us that it just showed up at Mac OS Rumors), you may want to be a little wary; true, the specs therein are pretty much in line with the modest improvements we've been expecting all along (e.g. the aforementioned 800/933/dual-1000 breakdown), but there's at least one surprise that gets our admittedly hair-trigger spider sense a-tinglin': supposedly there's going to be an ATI RADEON 7500 in the low-end model, when nVIDIA just made a big deal about its technology being "standard in all Apple desktops." If you can get past that minor stumbling block, however, there are definitely some things to like about those alleged specs-- such as the as-yet-unannounced nVIDIA GeForce4 MX shipping in the two top-tier models and the bundling of a bunch of useful third-party Mac OS X-native software, such as Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X and LemkeSoft's GraphicConverter.

We're still putting those reports on the "maybe" pile, though. After all, why judge now? We'll know the absolute truth "shortly," right?