Are you the kind of person who ransacks the house when no one's home to find your Christmas presents early, opens them to find out what you got, carefully rewraps them to remove any signs of tampering, and then delivers an Oscar-worthy performance on Christmas morning as you open them "for the first time"? If so, then all that practice at feigning surprise will come in handy as we deliver the latest update on the G4 development front: according to AppleInsider, Motorola may be three to six months behind on the "enhanced" G4 architecture code-named "V'Ger." We're shocked! We're stunned! We're utterly floored! (Was that convincing?)

V'Ger, for those who have long since lost interest in the glacial pace of PowerPC development and have instead taken up the relatively exciting spectator sport of watching paint peel, has also been referred to as the "G4+" and the "G4e." It's a revamped version of the classic G4 that (we think-- it's been a while) features enhanced Altivec performance and also tosses copper tech into the mix. The upshot, for those of you watching the bottom line, is that V'Ger is supposed to run at 600-800 MHz. Depending on whether you're a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty sort of person, from a clock speed standpoint, that's either "20-60% faster than we've had for a year" or "still barely half of what the x86 architecture is already pumping out."

Here's the thing, though: earlier there were rumors that V'Ger (which has been in the works for a long time) would be available in reasonable quantities soon enough to power new Macs sometime during the "first calendar quarter of 2001." Now, though, AppleInsider reports that Motorola's "most recent target date" for the new chip is "next June." Before you freak out, this doesn't necessarily affect Apple's alleged plans to launch new Power Macs at the Expo in a couple of weeks; those systems (as well as the PowerBook G4) reportedly use overclocked PowerPC 7410 processors instead of V'Gers anyway. Whether or not that was the original plan is anyone's guess, but in any event, don't expect Apple to ship systems faster than 600 MHz anytime soon.

Okay, you can pick your jaw up off the floor now, before you trip on your tongue-- no one's buying your "I'm stunned beyond the ability for rational thought" act. You'd have to be congenitally clueless to be surprised by a delay in PowerPC clock speed advances at this point; they're just a part of life. But hey, console yourself with happy thoughts of the future. AppleInsider says that Apollo, the G4 due after V'Ger, forms the basis for Apple's plans to debut a quad-processor Power Mac with four gigahertz chips in early 2002. Tell you what: if Motorola actually pulls it off, then you'll see some genuine surprise around the AtAT headquarters. Even though Intel may well be at something like 2.6 GHz by then...