Wake the kids, phone the neighbors, and do your best Carol Anne Freeling, 'cause they're heeeere! We'd had our hopes, of course; over the weekend, faithful viewer Richard Plotkin tipped us off to a New York Times article on 64-bit computing which referred to the Power Mac G5 as "set to arrive in stores today." The thing is, we've all been burned by reputable (or even "reputable") news sources before, and since there was always a chance that we were getting Jaysoned on this, we tried to keep our excitement down to a simmer. But feel free to go to full boil, because as faithful viewer Lynch Allison was first to point out, for confirmation you now need look no further than Apple's own home page. (If you're still on the fence over whether or not to blow the funds on one of these puppies, the box design alone should be enough to push you over the edge. Mmmmmmmm.) And look, we've got a press release to match!

Now, judging by the handy wiener dog calendar on the wall, it's... well, it's December 2002, which doesn't do us a lot of good. (Is August too late to buy a new calendar? We've been kinda busy.) But according to iCal, it's only the 18th of August, which means that Apple met its "in August" shipping deadline with almost two full weeks to spare. There is a slight catch, however, which is that only the two single-processor systems are shipping so far, and while Apple reports that it's taken a tenth of a million preorders for G5 Power Macs (holy yikes!), based on our own anecdotal evidence, we estimate that of those 100,000 preorders, single-processor orders make up about... oh... six of them. Call it seven. Still, that means there are going to be seven very happy Mac users once the UPS guy plays Santa in a few days.

As for the 99,993 of you waiting for full-power dual 2.0 GHz rigs instead, hang in there-- Phil "Steve Was Busy Playing 'Escape Velocity' So I'm Doing the Press Release Quote" Schiller claims that Apple is "right on track to deliver the dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 later this month." The clock's a-tickin', but with only thirteen days to go, Phil sounds sure enough that there's little reason to doubt his word. Plus, he was a Boy Scout, ya know. (Okay, we're just guessing. But he's got "Mac vs. Pentium Bake-off Merit Badge" written all over him.)

And this "shipping now" thing is even good news for the rest of us, meaning "the poor slobs who can't scrape together the filthy lucre for a G5 of any flavor right this second"; the fact that production systems are shipping to customers strongly implies that demo units ought to be surfacing at Apple retail stores any day now. The few stores we called at random confirm that they're still just as G5less as the rest of us, but Mac OS Rumors claims that a few locations have them right now, and all stores are expecting perforated aluminum show ponies within days, if not hours. Well, okay, days are hours, just more of them, but basically the point we're trying to convey is Real Soon Now™. And who knows? When we get the opportunity to fondle a G5 up close and personal, there's always a chance we'll be inspired to make that lateral career move into grand larceny we've been putting off for so long.