We forgot to say it a week ago, but... Happy August! And indeed, it should be a happy August, since this is the month in which the long-awaited Power Mac G5 is finally supposed to ship. Yes, friends, any day now the G5 will be more than just that cheese-grater-looking thing on TV that excels in user propulsion and massive property damage. It'll be more than the catalyst of a zillion arguments about benchmark methodology, largely by people whose only qualification to be discussing such things is that they once made a mark on a bench. It'll be more than that thing that's displaced naked supermodels in your dreams and thereby caused your therapist to express grave concern over your mental well-being. Yes, pretty soon you'll actually be able to own one. (Assuming you've got the funds, of course.)

But wait, is August the G5's ship month? Some sources say it's not. Don't panic, though, we're not saying it's really going to be September or October; we just mean that, technically, the G5's ship month was July. As in last July. See, AppleInsider insists that the G5 is shipping, even though it's not "shipping"; reportedly Apple has put "several Power Mac G5 units in the hands of its prized customers for several weeks now." So who rates such special treatment? "Larger corporate and government customers," apparently, who are all merrily tooling along on their G5s running a prerelease build of Mac OS X 10.2.7, while the rest of us regular people are stuck limping along with the ungainly waddle of dual-1.33 GHz G4s or what have you. But mama never told you life was going to be fair.

The fact that G5s were available for the "right" customers last month isn't terribly surprising, nor does it mean a whole heckuva lot-- unless you ran out and bought a lovely peridot birthstone brooch for the G5 to commemorate its ship date, and now you feel compelled to exchange it for a ruby one. Of course, if you want to make it personal, the G5's ship month is actually a moving target; if you're just getting around to ordering one now, you're going to be waiting for a while. At last check, the Apple Store lead time on new Power Mac orders is 4-6 weeks-- and that's for the single-processor models. If you want the dual-2.0 GHz system that's so goldurned popular with the jet-set crowd, you'll be waiting 7-10 weeks instead. So the ship month for you would be September, or even October. Ouch. Opal earrings, anyone?