Enough about Tiger; as far as new hardware is concerned, the most recent rumors were right: we may not have any new Macs to drool over today, but at least we have some seriously crazy displays to suck our credit cards dry. Finally, displays that match the G5 enclosure! Displays that can plug directly into matching PowerBooks without an expensive and dorky adapter! So IBM didn't make it to 3.0 GHz; so what? Who's going to notice a GHz or so missing from your new Power Mac when it's jacked into an aluminum-clad colossus with enough pixels to drown a giraffe?

We admit that we weren't crazy about the design at first, but it's growing on us, and we're told they look much nicer in person. What we did like right off the bat were the specs; as rumored, Apple still has three displays in its lineup, but now the smallest one is a 20-incher, which is, frankly, almost ridiculous while also being pretty freakin' cool. The mid-range model is the new 23-incher, while the top of the line is the Godzilla of all LCD displays, a 30-inch (well, technically, 29.7-inch) titan with 4.1 million pixels splayed out in a 2560x1600 resolution. All three have a nifty tilt stand; all three have two USB 2.0 and two FireWire ports built in; all three connect to industry-standard DVI ports. And if the contrast, brightness, and response time numbers on Apple's tech specs page can be believed, all three are apparently so gorgeous you'll never want to look at anything else ever again. Which we suppose could present a bit of a problem, actually, but hey, cross that bridge when you come to it.

Now, again with the caveat that we're currently just giving our breathless initial impressions and anything we say of a vaguely factual nature may dissolve like so much cheap toilet paper in rain once subjected to the sobering light of subsequent research, are we understanding this right-- that this sick new 30-inch aluminum behemoth requires a G5 and a special graphics card? Because if so, all those hopes that Apple's abandonment of ADC for DVI might lead to Wintel users buying Apple's superior displays don't quite pan out. As far as we can make out, the 30-incher has too many pixels to be filled with a single DVI channel, so in order to drive this thing you have to have Apple's specially-engineered, G5-only NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card, which pushes two DVI links through one cable. (So the 30-incher is actually being driven more like two separate displays that have been welded together at the seams.)

So evidently it's not Wintel-compatible-- which is just as well, because when was the last time you met a Wintel user willing to shell out $3,299 for a display, let alone another $599 for the only graphics card that'll drive it? Indeed, even though the 20- and 23-inch models are technically Windows-compatible, we can't see many folks in the Windows crowd laying out the ducats to buy them when (admittedly lower-quality) displays with the same resolutions are available for hundreds less. And yes, we are a little wigged out that Apple's cheapest display (not counting the older 17-incher, which is still available for $699 in that same second-class-citizen way that Apple has sold G4s for the past year) is now $1,299. We figure that if we ignore it it'll go away. La la la we can't hear you la la la la laaaa!!

We will say this about that Apple DDL card, though: you just gotta love the moxie it took to put two dual-link DVI ports on that thing. Yes, assuming you've got $6,598 (and a desk the size of Montana), you can actually hook two 30-inchers to your G5 and enjoy 8.2 million pixels of screen real estate spanning a combined five diagonal feet. But a word of caution to anyone rich and crazy enough to try this: running a mouse cursor across a Desktop that size all day will almost certainly give you one Popeye arm, sans anchor tattoo (unless you really want one). To be forewarned is to have forearms-- ones that don't look like an anaconda that swallowed a Volkswagen.