And hey, the 20-inch iMac wasn't the only rumored Mac to materialize today: in another press release, Apple invites us to say howdy to the new dual-processor 1.8 GHz Power Mac G5, which gives you two, two, TWO chips for the price of one! Or, actually, for the price of one and one twenty-fourth-- the single-processor model was $2399, if memory serves, and the new dualie is $2499. But wait! If you order in the next ten minutes, that extra Bennie buys you more than just a second processor; you also get a second independent 900 MHz frontside bus absolutely free! Operators are standing by. (Sorry, no C.O.D.'s.)

Other than tossing an extra processor and bus in the cabinet and jacking the price by a hundred clams, though, it's the very same G5-- only with new two-fisted kung fu action, which ought to provide a serious speed boost during certain compute-intensive activities. And while the price of the midrange system went up (and justifiably so), the sticker price of the entry-level model went down. A single-processor 1.6 GHz G5 will now set you back just $1,799 (down from $1,999), thus lowering the cheapest ticket on a G5 flight by two hundred smackers. Nice. The top-of-the-line dual 2.0 GHz model is the same as it ever was, however, which strikes us as a little odd, since the only difference between the new dual 1.8 and the dual 2.0 is the clock speed and a better graphics card in the high-end model. Aren't people going to balk at spending $500 for an extra 200 MHz (times two, we suppose) and a RADEON 9600 instead of a GeForce FX 5200?

Then again, maybe that's the point; if 2.0 GHz chips are scarce, Apple might as well push the 1.8s as a bargain ride to Dualtown. So the important thing to note, here, is that the cost of getting a single- or dual-processor G5 just dropped by $200 and $500, respectively, and with a little luck that'll grab the hearts, minds, and wallets of some of the geeks waltzing into the holiday shopping season concerned that they really just don't have enough credit card debt.

Meanwhile, faithful viewer Michael Svensson notes that Apple has completely overhauled its G5 Performance page to include the dual 1.8 GHz model in all speed comparisons-- and to drop those controversial SPEC scores that, if you subscribe to the theory that there's no such thing as bad press, grabbed Apple a whole lot of extra "unbad" attention since they were first posted. The speed charts now deal exclusively with real-world (cough) performance in Apple's pro target markets, so they cover stuff like Photoshop filters, real-time video playback and rendering, and DNA sequence matching-- and, of course, in all published cases, Pentiums, Athlons, and Xeons all get spanked so hard their butts break the sound barrier. Any bets on how long it'll take before the x86 world details how Apple cheated again? Tick... tick... tick...