Okay, it's been over six full weeks since Steve took the wraps off the first Mac ever with a processor (or two) that broke the gigahertz barrier; that should be plenty of time for even the most charitable Mac fan to have gotten over the novelty and have started getting antsy for even more performance, right? Nobody's still getting rug-burn on their chins and leaving a visible path of drool behind them over the dual-gigahertz Power Mac, are they? Because if any of you are still floored by that, we can wait until the effect wears off, but seeing as there were plenty of rumor hounds who were so jaded that the prospect of two 1 GHz G4s purring under the hood actually left them disappointed last January, we figured this was a safe time to broach the subject of the next big performance leap.

Ah, nuts to the laggards; if they're still going ga-ga over gig-gig, they won't mind if we plow ahead anyway. So here's the spiel: according to Mac OS Rumors, Apple is planning another incremental Power Mac revision this summer, and it's a doozy: rumor has it that the upcoming PowerPC 7500 G4 chip will let Apple ship a dual 1.4 GHz system, thus achieving a 40% increase in raw clock speed in just half a year. Better yet, though, these mid-year Power Macs also allegedly pack "400 MHz RapidIO-compatible memory," which would finally open up one of the Mac's worst remaining bottlenecks: memory throughput. If all of this is even remotely true, the platform's looking at a serious speed boost on the high end come this July's Expo or thereabouts. We here at AtAT are especially looking forward to seeing our dual 800 MHz rig look like a drunken slug once these alleged 1.4 GHz units hit the streets some seven or eight months after our cripplingly expensive purchase. It'll be painful, but it'll hurt so good.

Now, we're absolutely certain that there are at least a handful of you out there whose reaction to these unsubstantiated rumors of dual 1.4 GHz G4 / RapidIO bliss was little more than an eye-roll and a twitchy demand to know why, come this summer, Apple still won't have a Power Mac G5 ready to roll. Hey, c'mon, people, we've been telling you for ages that we don't expect a G5 until early next year; don't blame us if your expectations are a little out of whack. Geez. We should lock you in a room with the people who are still in awe over the dual-gigahertz systems; maybe there will be some kind of "expectation osmosis" or something, and you'll all come out with reasonable Mac-predictive perspectives. We can but dream.