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In fact, even the announcement that Mac OS X would be delayed was no real surprise. Anyone who got a glimpse at developer preview 3 (DP3) would have predicted that a full release in summer was being somewhat optimistic.

And, finally, the news from Apple vice president Phil Schiller that the company is not working on a handheld machine, while disappointing for the legions of Mac fans that wanted an Apple-badged Palm, isn't that surprising ö it is, after all, unlikely that Apple would announce a consumer device at a developer show.

The highlight, for many people at least, will have been the demonstration of multiprocessing Macs ö the first ones to make an appearance for several years. Multiprocessing means a lot of performance, if you have software and systems to take advantage of it. For designers and publishers in particular, this kind of performance is needed, as you'll know if you've ever had to wait for Photoshop to do its stuff. The G4 didn't mean the end of the progress bar.

When asked when the multiprocessing machines would be released, an Apple representative said 'by next WWDC.' Interestingly, this is virtually the same form of words that was used when Apple demonstrated the first G4-based machines, at WWDC last year. And, as everyone knows, the G4 was

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then released at the Seybold publishing conference, the following September.

So could we see multiprocessing Macs as early as the autumn? Certainly, there's probably very little problem with a release schedule like this if you're considering only the hardware. It would be fairly simple to re-engineer the current Power Mac G4 as a multiprocessing machine, delivering extremely high performance.

The problem with this schedule, however, is the software ö Mac OS 9 simply isn't optimised for use with multiple processors, which means that applications have to be specially re-written in order to take advantage of them. With Mac OS X, on the other hand, any application built with either Carbon or Cocoa will take advantage of both processors ö and, if Apple's demonstration is to be believed, the performance increase will be spectacular.

It's extremely unlikely that Apple will release machines without an OS that makes the most of them. So there are two options available. The first option is to release the machines in autumn, with a beta version of Mac OS X. This, however, can be ruled out, on the grounds that offering support for it would be a complete nightmare.

The second is simply to delay release until Mac OS X is ready, probably January or February ö and this is probably the most likely scenario. But is does mean that Apple will be effectively locked out of the highest end of computers for some time, and with content creators ö Apple's biggest traditional market ö requiring ever more power this will place the company at a disadvantage compared with multiprocessing Windows 2000 machines.

It's not ideal ö but given that Apple will be anxious to avoid a repeat of the fiasco that lead to the late arrival of 500MHz Power Mac G4's, it looks likely that January is the most likely date for the arrival of the most powerful Apple computers yet.