Loath as we are to lay problems on a scapegoat, we're going to do it anyway: we officially pronounce Motorola to be the bane of Apple's existence. We are now more convinced than ever that the PowerPC's relative stagnation is some kind of intricate vengeance against Steve Jobs for killing the Mac clone market and sticking Motorola with the loss on all those StarMax units. Think about it for a second and all the pieces click into place. First higher clock-speed G4 chips were late, forcing Apple into the embarrassing position of having to downgrade the speeds of its entire Power Mac G4 line. Then, by the time that 500 MHz G4s finally made it out of the gate, Intel and AMD had already crossed the gigahertz barrier, firmly entrenching Apple in loser territory as far as the Megahertz Wars go. And remember those rumors that Motorola pulled licensing strings to prevent IBM from shipping faster G4s to Apple out of sheer spite?

Aside from the whole clock speed issue, now there's this whole G3/G4 dichotomy that's probably got Apple's marketing people climbing the walls. As you well know, Apple's split its product lines into "pro" and "consumer" halves, but for the past six months only the pro desktop Mac has had the supercomputer G4 at its heart. The PowerBook continues to use a G3-- not a weak chip by any stretch of the imagination, but after Apple hyped the gigaflop performance of the G4, it's got to be a little tough pushing a pro laptop that isn't as crunchy as the pro desktop. Until the G4's power consumption issues get ironed out, though, the PowerBook is G3-bound. For a while it looked like IBM might be coming to the rescue with its new silicon-on-insulator technology which should be able to squeeze a G4 into the PowerBook; according to a ZDNet article, though, Apple's got another option for PowerBooks this fall: revamped IBM G3s running at up to 700 MHz. (Notice how all the problems stem from Motorola, while the solutions come from IBM?)

So that's the conundrum Apple faces... when it releases its next PowerBook, it can either throw in a 700 MHz G3 or an SOI-enhanced G4, probably running at a much lower clock speed. The first option risks disappointing pro users who have been holding out for a full-fledged PowerBook G4; the second would probably yield slightly lower overall performance, a lower clock speed, and a heftier price tag. Either way, Apple's marketing folks have a tough road ahead, and we figure it's all Motorola's fault. Remember, this is the company that's actually ditching all of its own corporate Macs in favor of Windows systems; doesn't exactly inspire confidence, does it? If that isn't an indication that the PowerPC's lagging performance is an elaborate Motorola revenge scheme, we don't know what is.