The saga continues; the seemingly neverending wait for post-500 MHz Macs finally took a quantum leap forward yesterday-- or at least a quantum baby step. For our part, we're just glad that anything happened at all. As pretty much all of us expected, Motorola officially took the wraps off some new gear yesterday at the Microprocessor Forum-- but whether the news is good or bad depends on your point of view. The happy part is this: now that the 1 GHz G4 processor has really and truly been announced (as noted in a CNET article first pointed out by faithful viewer James Ferguson), those of you who have been holding your breath for faster PowerPC chips can finally exhale. Sort of.

Before we get into the ickier side of the announcement, go ahead and roll that luscious phrase around in your mouth for a while: 1 GHz G4. The very notion is enough to make even the most jaded Mac fan well up with tears of joy. Even Motorola's code name for the processor is full of hope: Apollo. The sun god. The god of light, as well as of poetry and music. The model of "manly grace and beauty." We can hardly wait for this plucky guy to grace our platform with his artful presence.

Unfortunately, it looks like we're going to have to. The CNET article makes no mention of any sort of release date for Apollo, and notes that Motorola spokesperson David Bearden made it clear that Apollo will be a direct descendent of the "V'Ger" G4 design. What's wrong with this picture? Well, offhand, we'd say it's the fact that the 700 MHz V'Ger was Motorola's topic at last year's Microprocessor Forum-- and the company still hasn't even shipped that yet. Worse still, Bearden didn't even give any indication of when V'ger would finally see the light of day, and according to The Register, he spoke his piece and then hightailed it out of the conference without taking a single question. (We can understand that; no one wants to have to answer questions like "Does the Somerset Design Center only hire engineers with debilitating head injuries?" and "What's it like to have no shame?")

So that's that. At this rate, next year perhaps we'll be tooling along on 700 MHz V'ger-powered Macs (if we're lucky) while Motorola introduces the 1.5 GHz "Atomic Wedgie" processor-- and Apollo will still be nowhere in sight. In the pre-announcement department, Motorola is rivalling Xtrem (those 1.2 GHz microphone people) for sheer goofiness. But at least your dad always said that waiting builds character.