Whom to believe? Rumors of a Power Mac G4 delay are surfacing once again; a few weeks ago the whispers focused on how Motorola had allegedly fallen far behind schedule in its development of the actual PowerPC G4 chips that will eventually fuel Apple's next-generation systems, once widely expected sometime this fall. For what it's worth, a Motorola spokesperson came forward and flatly denounced those rumors, stating that the G4 was still well on track for its scheduled volume shipments sometime in the third quarter of this year, and not six months later as the rumors claimed. Since Apple's progress on the "Sawtooth" motherboard for the Power Mac G4 seemed to be fine, we once again thought it was pretty safe to assume that we could budget for a speedy new G4 sometime late this fall-- assuming Motorola wasn't bluffing.

Except that now The Register is reporting that Apple's G4 boxes aren't likely to surface before sometime next year, supposedly by Apple's own admission. A source who attended a Toronto promotional shindig thrown by Apple and Adobe claims that Apple's own representatives repeatedly said that the G4s would "not begin shipping until at least May 2000." May?! Pardon our impatience, but Apple's been shipping G3-based systems for a long time now, and we just feel that's a tad late to move up to the next level, assuming that Motorola can get them the chips six months earlier. Either Apple knows something that Motorola's not voicing publicly, or maybe there are problems with Sawtooth development that haven't leaked out of Cupertino yet.

Of course, since Apple hasn't even announced a Power Mac G4 yet, we're definitely not going to get any official comment from them, but it's also certainly possible that the Apple staffers at the Toronto event were simply misinformed, or working from older information. (We can't tell you how many times an Apple representative at Macworld Expo has given us blatantly incorrect information. It happens.) Or maybe it's another case of Apple planning to underpromise and overdeliver. Or maybe the whole rumor is a ruse in the first place. Perhaps Apple will have something to say about upcoming G4 Macs at Expo; we can hardly wait to hear what the party line is by then.