Well yesterday Apple Computer smacked everyone upside the head yesterday with super-spiffiness. (Editorial Note: Please forgive Chris, he is still in a state of euphoria from said announcement.)

Not only did Apple announce the release, in August (jerks), of the new spanky Powermac G5, they previewed Panther aka the upcoming release of Mac OS X... and iSight and iChat AV, and Safari 1.0!

Shoo, that is alot of new stuff for me to assimilate.

One thing I am really happy about, is that the power has really come home... finally.  In August the machines shipping will clock in at 1.6, 1.8 and dual 2.0 ghz, with FSB running at half processor speed.  Yep that is right if you are the prowd owner of the top o' the line Dually, you wil have a FSB running at 1 ghz.

Add to this the fact that the G5 is a 64 bit processor allowing for the breaking of the 4 gig RAM barrier; they all now support 8 gigs of RAM, as well as the fact that they all come equipped with digital and analog audio in and out, and you start to see the potential here.  Oh and one other thing; they start out at $1999 for the low end model, a 1.6 ghz single processor going all the way up to $2999 for the top o' the line dual 2 gig.

You may think this is a might expensive... and you would be right until you looked at the competition, which now is the 64 bit processor market.  As of this time the only computer that compares with the power and feature set of the G5 (and it really doesn't in any way.) is the HP zx6000 which is weighing in at around 4900.00 dollars for a single 900 mhz system, and they don't offer anything above a dual 1.0 ghz set up.  And oh did I mention that the HP is a server, and the G5 is a dektop?