Yes, there are finally faster Power Macs; that's the good news. The bad news, of course, is that the G5s inside them top out at 2.5 GHz, which most of us had hoped for three to five months ago, and since the Worldwide Developers Conference and its long-awaited Stevenote are less than three weeks away, the chances of Fearless Leader announcing another Power Mac update at that time are, shall we say, remote. In other words, Steve's "3 GHz within twelve months" promise looks poised to fall over sideways, and the scenario described in the "3 GHz by the end of summer" variant sounds increasingly unlikely as well. Can it really be true? Did Steve lie to us? Or was he even possibly a little bit... wrong?

"Surely not," you reply, and we fully acknowledge that there are ways for Steve to keep his 3 GHz promise without wreaking total havoc on the new Power Mac line-up; we like faithful viewer jkundert's suggestion the best, which is that come WWDC, Steve might take the wraps off the legendary "Xstation." The Xstation, you may or may not be aware, has long been rumored to be an ultra-high-end workstation targeted at ultra-ultra-serious professionals who haven't got two spare nanoseconds to rub together-- but do have deep enough pockets to spend as much cash as possible on the fastest gear on this plane of reality. It wouldn't matter that Apple had just rejiggered the specs and pricing of the Power Mac line three weeks earlier, because the Xstation won't be a Power Mac. And a dual 3.0 GHz Xstation that costs four or five grand would fulfill Steve's 3 GHz pledge while also keeping demand low enough that IBM wouldn't catch fire trying to crank out too many of the top-of-the-line chips. See? Everything would work out just fine.

Unfortunately, it's not going down like that. Because we haven't yet told you the worst news of all: faithful viewer David Poves forwarded us a MacCentral article which includes a whole mess of scary quotes from Tom Boger, Apple's Director of Power Mac Product Marketing. How scary, you ask? Try this little gem on for size: "All in all, no, we are not getting to 3 GHz anytime soon."

Ouch. Like a sledgehammer to the temple, isn't it?

Yup, there it is, blunt as can be and straight from Apple itself-- and thus does the dream die today. Boger explains the situation thusly: "When we made that prediction, we just didn't realize the challenges moving to 90 nanometer would present. It turned out to be a much bigger challenge than anyone expected." Okay, so Apple's eyes were bigger than its stomach. It can happen to anyone. While Boger may be pushing it when he says that Apple's new Power Mac lineup is "something that our customers will be very happy with," he's right (mostly) when he asserts that the new models represent "a very significant upgrade in performance"; after all, a 25% clock speed boost is nothing to boo-hoo about. But man, we are never going to hear the end of this from the Intel crowd. Now all the planets are gonna start cracking wise about our mamas.

Oh, and just in case you haven't had enough dreams crushed by the Bogernator, he also warns us "not to expect a G5 anytime soon in a PowerBook-- certainly not before the end of the year" and says that "it's the same story" with trying to shoehorn a G5 into an iMac; "that would be a heck of a challenge." Quick, somebody shove a sock in this guy's yap before he tells us that Apple will never ship a quad-processor Mac, the Mac Tablet is just a rumor, and there's no Santa Claus!