Well, folks, as you've no doubt noticed, the long-awaited date of March 23rd has come and gone, with nary a new Power Mac G5 to show for it-- a fact that has led legions of true believers in the International 3/23 Cult to throw themselves under buses in disappointment. (The cult members are fine; the buses were parked at the time. They weren't that disappointed.) Now most Mac fans jonesing for a 2.5ish GHz fix are placing their fragile hopes on the widely-speculated "March 26th-esque" date instead, which, of course, covers everything from today through Tuesday the 30th-- and if speed-bumped Power Macs aren't announced by then, there are going to be an awful lot of devastated fans sticking their heads into ovens. Electric ones, sure, and turned off, but hey-- it's dark in there.

Then again, it's not like the day was a total wash-out on the G5 front; Apple did at least issue a press release to announce that it's finally started shipping the Xserve G5 as of today. If you're not up on the saga, Apple waited a full six months after the G5's coming out party before announcing that the chip was finally going into the Xserve, and promised that Xserve G5s would ship in February. One week into an Xserveless March, the company admitted that there was a delay, but assured us all that it was "working hard" to ship the new servers this month. Well, the good news is that all that hard work paid off, and the first Xserve G5s are finally winging their big, flat ways to customers the world over. Well, some of them, anyway. So far, it's actually only the single-processor Xserve G5s that are getting shipped, and Apple reports that the dual-processor models won't roll off the lines until next month. Still, progress is progress.

Now, even if you could hardly care less about the availability of a $3000 server that gets screwed into a rack, it's worth repeating that the new Xserves use the very same PowerPC 970FX G5 processor that's expected to purr away inside the speed-bumped Power Macs. So if anything, Apple's Xserve news proves that the chips exist in a shipping form (although the continuing absence of dual-processor models doesn't say great things about processor availability), and should give hope to any impatient potential Power Mac customers who had all but given up. Hang in there, fellas-- they're coming any day now, we swear!

Just keep in mind that "any day" doesn't necessarily mean "any day this week." Because, see, about that whole March 26th thing... we'd be remiss not to point out that Mac OS Rumors, at least, isn't expecting new Power Macs to surface until the big NAB conference commencing on April 17th (during which Apple has scheduled a "special event"), or possibly just before. And if you put a lot of stock in hardware release schedules tied to the ends of potentially inventory-clearing promotion periods, faithful viewer David Wilson notes the existence of a UK extra RAM promo involving Power Macs that runs through-- are you ready for this?-- May 8th.

Why, the very notion of new Power Macs still being a month and a half away makes us want to leap screaming out the window. A first floor window, true, and onto a big pile of squishy pillows, but still, that's a lot more physical exertion than we're used to, and we could well pull a muscle or something in the process and be slightly uncomfortable for days. Talk about acts of desperation.