We know what a lot of you are probably thinking: "If Apple could get PowerPC chips from someone other than Motorola, they wouldn't be in this mess right now." Well, yeah, that's probably true, but sadly, Apple's got a million-horsepower hype engine cranking away, customers with cash in hand ready to buy G4s by the dozen, a ton of positive press on its side-- and a chip supplier squeezing out processors at a rate so slow you need a time-lapse camera to record it. The result? Lower-than-expected earnings and a stock price that "plummeted." (Plummeted to levels still wicked high compared to a month ago, that is.)

What about IBM, you say? Well, the "I" in the AIM alliance makes PowerPCs, to be sure, but they sort of parted ways with Motorola when it came to the PowerPC roadmap. See, IBM likes PowerPCs for its server products-- and servers apparently don't have a lot of use for vector calculations, and therefore AltiVec (dubbed the "Velocity Engine" by Apple) isn't a technology they plan to incorporate. So while Apple could get G4s from IBM (in theory, at least-- we haven't a clue if IBM's even producing their version yet), without the Velocity Engine, all those cool Pentium-crushing demos go right out the window. When last we heard, IBM was opening up to the possibility of including AltiVec in its chips, probably once they saw the world's reaction to Steve's G4 unveiling, but right now, Apple's only got one place to go: Motorola.

And this is the exact reason there's a subset of Apple Watchers who still say Apple should port the Mac OS to Intel-compatible x86 iron. That would certainly kill the chip shortage problem, since Apple would finally have multiple sources from which to get its processors, but from a PR standpoint, we're hard-pressed to think of a move more befitting the term "public relations suicide." After all, Apple's been claiming for years that PowerPCs are faster than Pentiums; imagine what fun the press would have if Apple suddenly announced it was switching to PIIIs. No, we doubt such a drastic move is necessary, and while the tensions between Apple and Motorola seem high (just check out the soap opera drama in the CNNfn article that faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil pointed out), we bet everything will get ironed out, G4s will be plentiful, and everyone will live happily ever after.