Six slots. Three Slots. Four slots. No one has any clue anymore just what Apple has planned for the high end of the Mac line when it comes to PCI expansion slots. The current "high end" isn't really high end at all-- the Gossamer motherboard in the Power Mac G3's was obviously designed as the basis for a line of midrange models. One need only consider its limited RAM expansion capabilities, its use of IDE for the main hard disk, its three PCI slots, and even its small size to come to that inescapable conclusion. The high end was supposed to be filled by the ill-fated "PowerExpress" Macs, which died a quiet death a few months ago after years of development. Apple's done a pretty good job of dressing up the current G3's as high end systems, and the fact that they've been able to do so at all is a testament to the sheer speed and power of the G3 processor.

But the real high end systems won't be appearing until November, and while just about everything we've heard about the upcoming designs is good (fast system bus, plenty of RAM and room to grow, kick-ass new industrial design), there's still that ugly sticking point-- the number of PCI slots. Instead of planning to include six slots in the new systems (as they did with the Power Mac 9500 and 9600 models), Apple is reportedly designing the machines with only four, though one of them will reportedly be a 64-bit slot. That just isn't enough to keep some existing Mac users from defecting to readily-available 6-slot Windows NT workstations for their video and graphics needs. That's why it was so cool to hear from Don Crabb that Apple was planning to announce a six-slot G3 minitower at the MacWorld Expo in a couple of weeks, which would include a 300 MHz G3 chip and cost less than $3000 with a 17" monitor included.

Too good to be true? Very possibly. How sad that Don recanted that news today, or he at least placed some serious doubts on its veracity. Other sources inside Apple now claim that Apple has "no plans" to build any systems with any more than the four PCI slots originally rumored-- and that, yes, we'll be waiting until November to see even those. Which means that digital media producers who need more slots either need to resort to a PCI expansion chassis, buy a Umax six-slot clone (while they still exist), or switch over to the Wintel world. None of these options strikes us as particularly attractive. But Apple's changed their minds before when community consensus told them they didn't know their collective ass from their elbow; witness the shift to Mac OS X and Carbon, after developer reaction to required Yellow Box/Rhapsody porting was devastatingly underwhelming. Perhaps we'll see a similar shift in the PCI stance sometime soon.