So as a Mac user, you're feeling pretty smug these days, right? The Power Mac G5 is slated to ship next month as the world's first 64-bit personal computer (because, as we all know, the Power Mac is a "personal computer" and not a "workstation"-- for some reason), and despite the peals of vehement denial ringing from the PC camp, you're confident that Apple's claim that it's the fastest personal computer ever will turn out to be completely and totally true. To what does the G5 owe its mighty Wintel-crushing power? Well, people who actually know something about technology will talk your ear off about frontside buses and in-flight instruction queues and quad-flangulating vobisculizers operating on independent telewopping pipelines, but that's all way over our heads, so we've decided it's all about bits.

Yup. 64 bits. Our calculator tells us that's twice as many bits as 32, so clearly the G5 is better than any of those piddly 32-bit chips being put into other, lesser personal computers. And lest you think that twice as many bits is only twice as good, make sure you check out this Macworld UK article that was published last Friday, apparently in an attempt to ensure that Americans were too boozed up on cheap, evil-smelling beer and preoccupied with pretty colored lights in the sky to notice. And it's a good thing, too, because in that article Apple product managers inform us that, due to the wonders of exponents, 64 bits is actually 4.3 billion times better than 32 bits-- a concept that would almost certainly put a less-than-sober person bearing fireworks straight into the burn ward.

Consider, here, the wonders of 64-bit technology: it supports up to 18 exabytes of RAM, which is an ungodly huge number of bytes-- roughly 18 billion gigabytes. According to this page, with 18 exabytes jammed into your Mac, you could take every single instance of every single word ever spoken by every single human being ever to exist, store it in RAM, and still have enough memory left over to run Microsoft PowerPoint without crashing. Maybe. And if you've ever been stymied by 32-bit computers' inability to express numbers greater than 4 billion (perhaps you have a really long enemies list), great news: now you can breathe freely all the way up to 18 billion billion. Carl Sagan would be proud.

But wait, disaster strikes! The Register just reported that Panther, the version of Mac OS X supposedly so darn optimized for the G5, is going to ship as a 32-bit operating system! That's right; apparently Apple did not opt to rewrite the entire OS from scratch to run only on the G5. (Go figure.) That means we're all being shortchanged by a full 32 bits! Scandal! Uproar! Murderous mobs descending upon Apple headquarters with torches and (for some reason) rakes demanding Steve Jobs's head on a stick!

Actually, apparently it's not as bad as all that. The Reg article is packed full of technospeak that, for us at least, makes slightly more sense once translated into Portuguese, but the one bit we're seizing on here is that "certain libraries and other elements have been recoded to allow applications-- and the OS itself-- to make use of the 64-bit addressing and datapaths." So while Panther itself won't be a 64-bit OS, it'll allow developers to access the full 64-bit goodness of the G5 processor should they need it. And hey, who doesn't need it? Our to-do list alone must be coming close to hitting that 4 billion ceiling by now.