Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY in the courtyard at One Infinite Loop-- it's the Battle of the Rumors Titans! Don't miss the action as Mac OS Rumors squares off against AppleInsider in a no-holds-barred virtual grudge match over the intro date of Apple's fabled sixth product category. Cheer wildly as contradictory "insider information" butts heads! Wince at the frustrating lack of substantive details or any sort of solid evidence whatsoever! We'll sell you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge! (No gambling, please.)

Now that we've chewed through our allotment of exclamation points for the week, we should clarify just what's going on, here. Remember last July, when Steve unveiled the Power Mac G4 Cube as the latest innovation that would have a profound impact on Apple's continued success? (Anyone who's been following the company's stock price knows that he sure wasn't wrong, but that's a whole other mess that's been beaten to death.) Well, at the time, he expanded Apple's product grid from four to six squares-- and the sixth has remained mysteriously vacant ever since. Anyone with a second-grade aptitude for logical thought was able to see that the sixth slot would probably house a portable device analogous to the Cube: smaller and sleeker than the PowerBook and iBook, not quite as feature-heavy as the PowerBook, faster than the iBook, and priced high enough to guarantee "disappointing" initial sales. Personally, we can't wait.

But here's the thing: mere days after AppleInsider reported last week that the long-awaited Mac OS subnotebook is "at least another eight months" away, Mac OS Rumors claimed to have received actual snapshots of a prototype model, and rattled off a few intriguing factoids just to keep us salivating. Of particular interest are the unit's apparent dimensions: "nearly as wide" as today's PowerBook, "slightly more than half as long front-to-back, and just over an inch thick." Now that's a laptop we could tote to Thailand and back without incurring a fortune in chiropractic fees. Too bad we have to wait eight months to see it, right? Nuh-uh... at least, not in the estimation of MOSR, who claims that "production should begin within weeks and we should see this remarkable ultraportable next month" at Macworld Expo.

So who's right? Well, that's what the Mac Rumors Cage Match is all about. But it's not really happening (even metaphorically speaking) on a Sunday; we'll know if MOSR was correct when Steve takes the stage on Tuesday, January 9th. For obvious reasons, we're rooting for MOSR on this one-- even though we personally won't be able to justify getting another laptop for a good long time, we're curious to see whether Apple's learned its lesson on "premium pricing," or if the "CubeBook" will send the company even deeper into its current hole. We're just in it for the drama, baby. Oooh, we suppose that cracks in the casing would be too much to hope for...

You've heard them all before... What goes around comes around. Every dog has its day. What goes up must come down. C'mon, any concept described by so many hackneyed expressions must be true, right? Karma, divine justice, Yin and Yang-- call it what you will, but the idea of the fundamental balance of the universe is central to hundreds of belief systems and resides deep within the human psyche and collective unconscious. Heck, it's probably the only thing that keeps Motorola going these days.

The problem with this whole "everything balances out in the end" idea is that there's no time limit on its application. So while Intel's been reigning supreme for years (at least in the areas of processor clock speed, mind share, chips sales, and dumb but publicly resonant commercials featuring disco-dancing Bunnymen and blue guys on crack), there's no divine buzzer which signals when Motorola gets its turn in the sun and Intel suffers the inevitable decline. The most optimistic of us figured that after so many years in the doghouse, Motorola would begin its meteoric rise to processor perfection beginning as early as late next year. After all, Intel can't possibly keep cranking out faster chips forever, right?

But forever's a very long time, and if you're holding your breath waiting for Intel to run out of steam, you might want to consider inhaling again for at least a few more years. Faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini forwarded us an Associated Press article about Chipzilla's latest breakthrough: transistors that are a mere 0.03 microns wide. Now that transistors have gotten that teeny, Intel figures it can pack about 400 million of 'em into a single processor. That's roughly ten times the number in the currently-shipping (and, arguably, currently-working) Pentium 4. Therefore, Intel may have earned Moore's Law a stay of execution, and the company estimates that it'll be able to create chips "ten times more powerful" than today's crop sometime within the next "five or ten years."

Meanwhile, we hear that Motorola's really close to bringing us Mac users a 600 MHz G4. Any day now. Honestly.

When it comes to the clock speed race, you've probably noticed that we generally focus on Motorola when talking about the PowerPC's current standing. That's because Apple decided to flog Motorola's AltiVec technology for all it was worth and market the G4 as a Pentium-killing supercomputer. Whether or not that's accurate from a technical standpoint, we can probably all agree that, marketing-wise, that may not have been the smartest choice. Sadly, when selling computers to the general public, clock speed is everything-- and since Motorola's G4 still tops out at an anemic-sounding 500 MHz, Apple's been prevented from even shipping faster-than-500 MHz G3 systems due to the all-important megahertz perception.

But Motorola's not the only company developing (or, at least, pretending to develop) PowerPC processors. Sure, IBM's development of the architecture usually focuses more on server-friendly designs rather than stuff like AltiVec which is handy for Macs. Still, though, for those of us who have been choking on the 500 MHz bone for the past year, word of a breakthrough from IBM still hits us like a nice cool breeze. Check it out: according to The Register, our buddies at Big Blue have just announced a new technology called "CMOS 9S" that can squeeze a transistor down to 0.13 microns in size. What does that mean to the megahertz issue, you ask? Well, try this on for size: PowerPC chips running at 10 GHz.

Hello? Hey, wake up! Breathe into a paper bag or something and relax. It's not like Steve is going to walk out on stage next month and announce 10 GHz Macs for sale at the Apple Store or anything like that. Odds are we won't see a PowerPC chip that fast for years-- though IBM is already starting to incorporate the technology into its Power4 processor, and The Reg thinks that the G3 may inherit some of that 0.13 micron goodness, too. Granted, IBM's transistors are still over four times the size of the ones that Intel claims to have made, but it's the sheer giddiness that comes from seeing the words "PowerPC" and "10 GHz" in the same sentence that's really got us jazzed. Ooooo, mama.