See? All good things come to those who wait-- and luckily for everybody in the Mac community, evidently that guideline applies equally whether one shuts up and waits patiently or complains constantly and fidgets like a ferret with a painful rash. As pointed out by faithful viewer clayromer, Apple has finally announced what we've all been speculating about for months, now: new Power Macs. And while those of you who ignored our advice and had your hopes up for a quad-G5 system running at 2.8 GHz may be slightly disappointed by the specs that have actually materialized here on this plane of reality, we're actually pretty psyched about these new systems.

As it turns out, that leaked PDF was evidently totally legit, because the specs were dead-on accurate: Apple's new Power Macs ship in 800 MHz, 933 MHz, and dual-1 GHz flavors; all models have 256 or 512 MB of RAM standard; all systems but the low-end one come with SuperDrives; and the entry-level model has ATI RADEON 7500 graphics, while the two higher-end systems boast the long-awaited nVIDIA GeForce4 MX. (Here's an interesting little tidbit: all of Apple's new Power Macs support dual displays right out of the box.) There's a nice Mac OS X-native software bundle, too, including the standard iApps plus a slew of third-party stuff like PixelNhance and GraphicConverter-- no, it's not Photoshop, but heck, who can wait until that finally ships in the year 2084? (Plus, we'll be too busy dodging Grunts, Brains, and Hulks to use it.)

The news gets better when you check out the prices. Granted, the 800 MHz config might still look a smidge anemic at $1599, but that 933 MHz model with a SuperDrive and a GeForce4 is a solid deal at $2299-- and the tricked-out dual-1 GHz unit is an absolute steal at $2999. Take it from your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, who just got the credit card bill for that dual-800 MHz G4 we bought for $500 more last month (ow); three grand for 15 gigaflops' worth of performance, a SuperDrive, a comfortable arsenal of bundled software, and a 64 MB video subsystem that supports two monitors and pushes over a billion textured pixels per second is one spanking nice deal. Trust us. And if you value price over top-of-the-line performance, MacMinute reports that you can score some sweet deals on yesterday's models-- like a dual-800 MHz G4 for $2499, or a solid thousand bucks off. (Double ow.)

Best of all is the availability date: now. As in, now, now. The Apple Store is dishing out estimated ship dates of 5-7 days for the entry-level model and 1-3 days on the other two, but a quick call to our local Apple retail store confirmed that they had all three models in stock, just waiting to be taken home; the only G4-based iMacs in the store, on the other hand, were the demo models. So chalk up one more reason to get a Power Mac instead of a new iMac: pure, unadulterated impatience. So what are you waiting for? Amass that debt!