Well, looky here; if AppleInsider's latest report is accurate, it seems that we at AtAT might owe Motorola's PowerPC design engineers a heartfelt apology. As first pointed out to us by faithful viewer Jonathan Reitnauer, an AI source claims that Motorola's development team in Somerset is "doing some really cool stuff" and even has PowerPC processors running at speeds "far beyond" the current public high-water mark of 733 MHz. (We noticed that Mac OS Rumors recently made a passing reference to Apple playing with a 1 GHz G4 in its testing labs, so that's "independent confirmation" of a sort.) Seeing as we're trusting types, we're going to take this info at face value-- and offer up sincere and humble apologies for the roughly eight or nine thousand nasty things we may have said about Motorola's design team in the past couple of years. Oops! Our bad!

Instead, AppleInsider reports that our ire should have been uniformly directed at Motorola's manufacturing division. Don't get us wrong-- we've certainly taken our share of potshots at the manufacturing side of Motorola's business in the past. But it sounds like most of the perceived sloth-like pace of PowerPC development is, in fact, the fault of the folks who actually crank out the chips (or fail to). The designers have faster chips working in the labs, but the manufacturing guys can't find a way to produce enough of them to allow Motorola to sell them as a released product... which means that while Motorola's labrats have had faster G4s working for many moons, production problems kept us stuck at 500 MHz for a year and a half.

Guess what? Apparently not much has changed. While Apple is currently shipping Power Macs running as high as 533 MHz, the 667 and 733 MHz models won't be surfacing for weeks, yet-- and possibly longer. It's the same old story: Motorola just can't seem to churn out a decent yield. Faced with yet another chip drought, the company appears to be falling back on an old plan-- namely, enlisting IBM's help to produce enough chips to satisfy demand. You may recall that Apple called on Big Blue to help the last time Motorola was having massive problems actually making enough announced and "shipping" processors. We have to think there's a pretty solid connection between IBM commencing supplemental G4 production last January and the 500 MHz Power Mac G4 (announced the previous August) finally shipping the very next month.

Is it a coincidence that the original G4 drought prompted Apple's first earnings warning that initially started its plunge back into the mire of beleaguerment? Probably not. Is another G4 drought behind Apple's recent product delays? We wouldn't be surprised. If IBM doesn't sign on quickly to save Motorola's bacon, will those product delays get nasty enough to send Apple's fiscal recovery straight down the toilet? Well, that's a plot thread for a future episode...