Grouse, grouse, grouse; man, Apple clearly had the right idea in mind when it decided on a low-key intro for the new Power Macs if all this complaining is any indication. Given how long it took to get here, you'd think that the G4 finally reaching 1 GHz would be cause for celebration-- and the fact that Apple's giving us two of them would be cause for thundering applause, merrymaking in the streets, and a bunch of arrests for public drunkenness. Instead we get a lot of Mac users who, despite our every plea to the contrary, got their hopes up for a Power Mac G5 running at 2.8 GHz with telepathic input capabilities, all wrapped up in a crystalline enclosure shaped like a large dachshund. And because of that, now they're complaining that the new Power Macs still use PC-133 RAM, don't have "Gigawire," and (horror of horrors) still look the same way they did six months ago. Boy, life is hard, isn't it?

So yeah, imagine what would have happened if Apple had scheduled a special press event and pumped out the sort of pre-release hype it's been so fond of tossing around lately, telling everyone to expect something that'll change life as we know it. Imagine the utter silence broken only by the chirping of crickets when Steve produced, with a flourish, a G4 that runs at the astounding speed of one whole gigahertz. Then imagine the scathing press and word of mouth the next day: "Apple finally catches up to Intel-- 18 months later." The new Power Macs are an incremental improvement, and a solid one at that-- but if the whining in the Mac camp can be taken as a minuscule sampling of the teeth-gnashing we would have gotten from the press at large, the stealth intro was undoubtedly the right decision.

Meanwhile, look on the bright side, Smacky: improvement is a never-ending journey that is a reward unto itself. (We know this to be true, because we saw it on a wall plaque from Successories.) If you need further evidence to that effect, Apple is even now improving the Power Mac in ways that'll make your head spin. But don't take our word for it-- just ask Matthew Rothenberg over at eWeek. In addition to being one swell fella, Matthew has always seemed to have an "in" with some pretty nifty sources privy to Apple's top secret hithers and thithers, and as faithful viewer William Bonde points out, Mr. Rothenberg is currently making noises about "new towers that already offer clock speeds in the neighborhood of 1.6 GHz and triple the performance of the current systems' 133 MHz system bus." On top of that, these not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Macs also reportedly boast "new versions of FireWire and USB," "DDR RAM," and a "faster interface to hard drives."

So when can we expect these MegaMacs? Well, Matthew seems to think they'll surface somewhat before the July Expo. Originally that would have sounded more than a little aggressive to our pessimistic ears, since we're pretty seriously resigned to waiting until at least late this year for an honest-to-goodness Power Mac G5. However, if what's being proposed is yet another Quicksilver enclosure packing a next-generation motherboard and faster Apollo G4s, then actually, that might be reasonable. It's just a "What If?" scenario, you understand, like the one in which Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four, but we can definitely imagine Quicksilvers with UMA-2 motherboards and faster Apollos in four to six months, and UMA-2 G5s with all-new enclosures at, say, next January's Expo. (If you're the type who needs something to complain about, you may want to get a head start and begin preparing now.)