The trouble in paradise continues; while Intel and AMD duke it out in 1 GHz territory, Apple's high-end offerings are looking positively anemic from a clock speed perspective, having climbed only halfway towards the Golden Gigahertz. But Apple doesn't make the chips-- that's up to Motorola. When Motorola was unable to ship 500 MHz G4 chips last year, Apple was forced to downgrade its whole Power Mac line; the unexpected earnings warning, the resulting Apple stock plunge, and the public outcry over the "speed dump" mark a serious stumble in Apple's otherwise glorious rebirth. So Apple turned to IBM and said, "Hey, now that you've licensed Altivec from Motorola, how about cranking out some G4s for us?" IBM agreed, and now we're finally hovering at 500 MHz. Listen... Hear that? That's the deafening silence of the Wintel world who's too ga-ga over 1 GHz chips even to utter a "Big whoop."

Now, rumor has it that IBM's been able to crank the G4 as high as 650 MHz, but Motorola has prevented the company from releasing them by pulling contractual strings in the Altivec license. Granted, 650 MHz still isn't much in the "wow" department next to the Big Gig, but it's a significant improvement, and Apple should be more than a little irked at Motorola not only for failing to reach decent clock speeds itself, but also for stifling IBM-- and, by extension, Apple itself-- for the sake of saving face. Just think of all those power users who could benefit from an extra 150 MHz of supercomputer speed. Remember, it's not just media creation types using Macs; there are also researchers, doctors, scientists-- why, by putting the reins on IBM we bet Motorola's delaying the cure for cancer. Or at least the next installment in the Budweiser "Wazzup!" commercials.

Well, as you know, Apple's not one to stand idly by while diseases go uncured and beer goes unhyped, so the company has sprung into action. According to Mac OS Rumors, the big guns are firing; everybody's favorite potentate, Uncle Steve himself, has gone in to break some heads. Oh, sure, "the many reports on this subject continue to contradict one another on numerous details," but that's the stuff of which legends are made. Fear not; there's no doubt in our minds that Steve's gone in to Motorola headquarters with RDF a-blazin'. And with luck, we'll start seeing Power Mac G4/650s shipping sometime before Intel unveils that 1.4 GHz Willamette...

Everybody knows that when you want to find out what the future holds for Apple product development, you don't ask a Magic 8-Ball; you ask Larry Ellison. But if Loose-Lips Larry isn't answering his phone (the guy must've finally gotten Caller ID), sometimes a bevy of random Apple product managers will do just as well. For instance, a Macworld UK article is chock-full of info about what Mac fans can expect Apple and others to release over the course of the next year or so. Among the stuff we can expect to grace our credit card bills: mobile phones that "work with" PowerBooks; third-party "Bluetooth" wireless networking solutions; two-way access to FileMaker Pro databases from mobile phones; DVD and FireWire in a future iBook; and iBook-like designs finally making it into the PowerBook.

Now, some of this comes as no surprise; few of us are unaware of the rumors that Pismo, the current PowerBook, was originally planned to ship with an iBook-type case, for example. And adding FireWire and DVD to the iBook sometime in the distant future only makes sense. The focus on wireless technologies shouldn't come as a surprise, but given that the stuff these product managers are discussing-- Bluetooth, WAP, infrared, etc.-- aren't AirPort, we admit, we're a teensy bit taken aback. Okay, Apple's been working with mobile phone manufacturers Nokia and Ericsson for "a year" now; so what does it mean, exactly, for a mobile phone to "work with" a PowerBook? Are we talking about wireless Internet dialup access? Synchronization with Personal Information Managers? What?

Personally, here's what we'd like to see in terms of wireless access and mobile phone integration: a small modem that plugs into a USB port on one end and a cellular phone on the other. Since our iBook lacks a PC card slot, we can't just run out and buy a cellular-capable card modem. (Well, okay, we could; we just couldn't actually use it.) The idea of burning cell airtime by surfing wirelessly down at the local coffeehouse holds great geek appeal. Maybe we'll have to drop Larry a line and see what he thinks...

Glory be, John Dvorak was right! While he never said so in so many words (well, okay, make that "so few words"), it was clear that he felt that any high-tech contraption so gosh-darned girly could only be the work of the devil himself. Now, while we never figured Apple industrial design guru Jonathan Ives for the diabolical type, it's no secret that the man pulling all the strings throughout the iBook's development was Steve Jobs. And do we really need to draw comparisons between Steve and the Prince of Darkness? We thought not.

C'mon, the iBook has the devil's fingerprints all over it. First it debuted incredibly late-- it missed a huge chunk of the crucial back-to-school buying season. And supply was very constrained for several months. Why? Because of the Taiwanese earthquake, which several people took to be a sign of the coming apocalypse. Doesn't that just make you go "hmmmmmm"? Then there was that mildly annoying tendency of the iBook to scramble all the data on its hard drive; if irretrievable data loss isn't diabolical, we don't know what is. Except, perhaps, for the way that Apple covered up the problem for months, and still doesn't post a huge flashing warning on its iBook Support Page cautioning users to turn off the "Preserve contents of memory" option in the Energy Saver control panel. Why, we're amazed that we never saw it before; it's only a matter of time before the weld lines in our Blueberry iBook start spelling out "Red Rum" and blood oozes from the speaker.

Okay, we can sense that you're still not convinced. Incurable skeptics, one and all... Well, here's the clincher: Go2Mac reports that a Japanese site called Tak.'s Mystic Room describes a process by which an iBook's clock speed can be increased-- an arcane and mystical practice known as "overclocking." By dancing naked around an inverted cross, sacrificing a small animal or two, and adjusting a couple of resistors (an occult ritual known as "The Voiding of The Warranty"), the iBook's G3 can be raised past its current speed of 300 MHz. How high can it go? Why, to a theoretical maximum of 666 MHz, of course. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!!