Okay, okay, we give in; no more jabs at Mac OS Rumors. (For a few days, at least.) The legendary big dog of the Apple rumor yard may have seemed a bit off its game for the past year or so, what with infrequent updates, declining accuracy, and Rumors Lite™-style content-- not to mention accusations of lifting info directly from AppleInsider and reposting it without credit. All that aside, though, the site's detractors will have to admit that MOSR does sometimes get a few things right, and occasionally long before anyone else. We're not just talking about the Cube story, either; have you seen AppleInsider's latest report on the IBM-Motorola scuffle?

In it, AppleInsider claims that the G4's current long-standing 500 MHz "bottleneck" is largely artificial. While it's allegedly true that Motorola has been unable to break its way into the upper half of the gigahertz range, rumor has it that IBM's "more advanced manufacturing processes" have enabled Big Blue to crank out "much faster" instances of the current G4 architecture for several months now. The reason that you haven't seen these rumored 600+ MHz IBM G4s appearing in any Macs is because they contain Altivec-- that much-touted "Velocity Engine" that Apple's always going on about. Motorola owns the Altivec technology. IBM licenses it from Motorola. And as a condition of that license, IBM is supposedly forbidden to ship these faster G4s until Motorola manages to catch up, which is why we Mac users are still staring at that same old 5 followed by those same two 0s.

Does this sound familiar? It should-- at least, if you happen to be a regular viewer of this particular program. We first introduced this sinister "Motorola's evil speed-killing legal choke-chain around IBM's neck" plotline way back on March 1st, when the rumor was first broken by-- you guessed it-- Mac OS Rumors. We returned to the storyline on March 6th, when MOSR posted more info on the nature of Motorola's mysterious hold over IBM. So, like the Cube, here's another example in which an MOSR report has later been corroborated by AppleInsider... in this case, over five months later.

We have two points, here. The first is that, if you're reading rumors sites for actual informational reasons, Mac OS Rumors still has something to offer. Since both it and AppleInsider are free and not mutually exclusive, we don't see why you'd pick one over the other. (We read them both for entertainment purposes, ourselves, and they're both rip-roaring fun-- though sometimes unintentionally so.) The other point we'd like to make is that if the aforementioned rumor is true, then whatever entity at Motorola is vetoing IBM's faster chips should bite the bullet and stop being such a poophead. Thank you, and good night.