That's one thing about Apple: regardless of any other complaints you may have, you can't say the company isn't concerned for the welfare of its customers. Well, you can say it, we suppose, but you'd be wrong. And kinda mean. Oh, sure, you can take issue with the company's pricing policies, its support policies, its "nobody gets into a retail store without wearing a sombrero and clucking like a chicken" policy, and so on and so forth. But when the higher-ups at Apple heard that its continuing delay in announcing new, faster Power Macs was causing some Mac fans' heads to explode, the company took decisive anti-head-blowing-up action. In other words: check it out, we have new eMacs!

Okay, granted, an arguably minor tweak to Apple's low-end consumer line-up isn't going to get many rumor addicts' motors revving, but at least it's enough of a development during a news lull to cut incidents of cranial eruption by a projected 45%-- and if that's not taking care of the user base, then we don't know what is. For your pressure-relieving dose of announcementy goodness, faithful viewer Michael Wyszomierski instructs you to look no further than Apple's press release, which confirms that the eMac, while decidedly not aluminum or G5-powered, is nevertheless now "faster" and "more affordable" than ever. Go on, give it a shot; it's just enough of a fix to put out the fuse on those ol' sinuses.

So what's different in the eMac line-up? Well, there are still two models, and the entry-level Combo Drive config remains at $799 (sorry, $599-and-under crowd; you're still going to have to hock an internal organ or something), but the deluxe SuperDrive unit just dropped from $1,099 to $999, so now you can get your iDVD mojo workin' for under a grand. In both units the G4 has gotten a boost from 1 GHz to 1.25 GHz, the system bus has accordingly been bumped from 133 MHz to 167 MHz, and the RAM has been doubled from a barely-useable 128 MB to a slightly-less-stifling 256 MB-- of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM, no less. The ATI graphics subsystem is now a Radeon 9200 (up from a 7500-- so it's 1700 better!) and the 4x SuperDrive in the high-end model has been replaced with an 8x one.

Of course, this is all simply incidental to the one really big change that customers will notice immediately: new product numbers! Whereas yesterday's eMacs were M9252LL/A and M8951LL/B, the new ones are M9425LL/A and M9461LL/A. Why this isn't front-page news at CNN is beyond us. And what's with Dubya not mentioning it in his speech? Priorities, people!

And there you have it: just enough of a product upgrade to keep your head from going pop. While it clearly won't carry any of us all the way through to the increasingly-likely-late-June Power Mac revision, we're sure Apple will see fit to squeeze in a couple more product updates between now and then to minimize the thinning of the herd. After all, it'd be a little too Twilight Zone if, by the time Apple gets faster Power Macs out the door, there weren't any Mac fans with sufficiently intact skulls left to buy them.