So Thursday came and went, with nary a Power Mac speed bump in sight. Evidently MacInTouch was right to pull their original news item, which stated that on Thursday the whole desktop G3 line would receive processor clock speed increases of 100 MHz across the board. If it had been true, that would have brought the current highest-end chip-- the 450 MHz speed demon-- down to the lowest-end system, while raising the bar on the fastest machines to a blistering 550 MHz. That would have been nice, because it would have brought Apple clock speed parity with Wintel manufacturers in the Megahertz Race. (Well, for a few days, anyway; longtime faithful viewer Russell Maggio notes that 600 MHz Pentium IIIs will ship this Monday, as reported in an Electronic Buyer's News article. So much for catching up.)

Anyway, it didn't happen, which means that Apple gets to fight its usual uphill marketing battle; it's easy to advertise something that's faster in raw numbers, because while not everyone reads and understands benchmarks even when they're displayed in USA Today-style 3D bar graphs, even the dimmest bulb can see that 600 is bigger than 450. If you're doubting that dim bulbs buy high-end computers, you haven't spent enough time hanging around in CompUSA or Best Buy-- but the argument applies for the "consumer-level" Intel chips, too: the 500 MHz Celeron debuts on Monday as well, which will only exacerbate the problem of consumers seeing that the iMac has "only" a 333 MHz chip. Bytemarks are one thing, but we suspect that nothing's as visceral to the average computer buying experience as raw clock speed. (Except, perhaps, for a killer industrial design and a choice of translucent colors...) And how do you quantify "ease of use?" Certainly not in any way that reduces to a three-digit number featured prominently in every catalog, Sunday circular, TV commercial, etc.

Regardless, Apple's been doing okay for quite a while now with systems that lag in the Megahertz Race, so we're not particularly worried. It's just that right now Apple's got something like 12% of the retail market by selling computers that look "slower" than the competition, while costing hundreds of dollars more. That's quite a feat. Now imagine what kind of market share Apple could start grabbing from new buyers if those three little digits before the "MHz" indicated that the Mac was as fast as the cheaper but uglier Wintel systems. We drool just thinking about it. But it could be a long, long time before that ever happens, so in the meantime, we'll just content ourselves with waiting for faster pro Macs; those shadowy "unnamed sources with contacts within Apple" wrote in to indicate that Apple just dropped employee prices on the current Power Mac G3s, so there probably is a speed bump coming in the near future.