Heads up, folks, because we're in a petulant mood; we'll serve no whine before it's time... and boy howdy, is it ever time! Like we said before, what with chunks of our archaic Quicksilver dual G4 falling off at regular intervals, we're definitely in the market for a new Power Mac-- but before placing an order we decided to wait a couple of days to see whether the new G5s are really as underwhelming as a first glance at the specs suggests. Guess what? Apparently they are... at least, from a Mac geek/tech snob perspective, but then again, isn't that the target audience?

If you follow the hardware rumors religiously, you probably recall that at one point the question on every dirt-slinger's virtual lips was whether the new Power Macs would pack the improved single-core PowerPC 970GX processor, or the long-awaited super-improved dual-core 970 MP chip. Well, as it turns out, the answer is a disappointing "C. None of the above"; according to Think Secret, this week's Power Macs contain the same ol' 970FX that's been shipping for ages, now, only ratcheted up a couple hundred extra MHz. In other words, we can probably expect that performance will scale roughly with the clock speed increase itself, which is a mere 8 percent at the high end. For this we waited ten and a half months? Not that this is Apple's fault, of course, since it's IBM that can't seem to crank out the goods as quickly as anticipated. Even Steve got rooked, buying that line about 3 GHz G5s shipping by mid-2004 and turning it into a promise to Apple customers that he would eventually have to break.

About the only good news on that front is that, according to Think Secret, when the 970GX and 970MP finally surface as real, non-vaporware parts to be shoved into new new Power Macs, both chips will debut at 3 GHz. And given Apple's obvious penchant for multiprocessor systems, is it out of the question to expect dual-dual-core Macs, or what will effectively be quad-processor Macs starting at 3.0 GHz per processor core? Don't answer that-- at least, not until you hear that Tiger contains references to counting a Mac's physical and logical CPUs, lending credence to the notion that a Mac with both multiple processors and multiple cores per processor ("logical CPUs") isn't just possible, but flat-out expected. (The grapevine insists that Apple already has 970MP-based prototypes running, so now it's just a matter of Big Blue getting off its Big Blue Keister.)

Think Secret interprets the addition of support for multiple-core processors in Tiger to mean that "dual-core Power Macs will be ready by year's end." In the meantime, we'll probably just add another layer of duct tape to this here battered but beloved ol' G4 and hope it can hang on until the next Power Mac revision. Besides, an uninspiring performance delta isn't even the real problem with the latest Power Mac lineup: faithful viewer David Krug was the first to point out that the new systems don't come with a modem anymore! What, now we're supposed to fax with an actual fax machine like all those regular chumps out there? Oh, the humanity.