Apple released new machines today. Nothing significant, really. Intel and crowd have had machines with higher megahertz than what's now available on the Macintosh for a while. After all, what good is a dual-gigahertz Macintosh when you can get an Intel running Windows at 2.2 gigahertz, right?

And you'd be right.

Except for the rest of the specs.

512MB RAM, standard. A brand-new, still-to-be-announced-by-the-company-who-makes-it NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX with 64MB of DDR RAM, with dual monitor hookups. An 80GB Ultra ATA hard drive. A SuperDrive, Apple's pet name for a drive that can burn home-viewable DVDs, in addition to your run-of-the-mill CD-R/RWs. Gigahertz Ethernet. USB. Firewire.Airport-ready.Oh yeah, and those two one-gigahertz G4 chips, offering up 15 gigaflops of pure, mainlined power.

Yeah, yeah, whatever, you say. Who can afford to pay Apple's historically high premiums for their top-of-the-line, drool-inducing computers?

Anyone with three grand.

You read it right. All that power, all those flopping gigas, can be yours for $2,999.

I suspect this is going to be hugely popular.