Just a quick heads-up to all those viewers who keep writing in to ask when Apple is going to stick a G4 in the iBook: give it a rest. It's not that we mind being asked; after all, we are the shadowy and all-powerful consortium who tells Apple's hardware designers exactly when to incorporate new technologies into each product line (c'mon, like you never suspected!). It's just that we're just a little concerned that you might be causing yourselves undue grief and frustration by waiting for an event that's probably still a long ways off. The iBook's pretty happy with a G3 under its hood; we see little reason to push it.

And if you don't believe us (for whatever bizarre reason your fevered little brain has concocted), maybe you'll believe Apple itself. MacCentral recently spoke to Apple's "director of consumer-education mobile products" Dave Russell, and Dave asserts that the 600/700 MHz G3 chips powering the current iBooks pack "plenty of punch" and yield "quite fine" performance for education/consumer purposes. He even goes so far as to say that the G3 "runs Mac OS X just fine," which is just about the ringingest endorsement we've yet heard for Apple's latest operating system running on a pre-G4 chip. For what it's worth, the AtAT staff runs Mac OS X on a 400 MHz G3, and we find it a little pokey, but we'd agree with Dave's assessment that performance is "just fine." As in, "How's it run?" "Fine." "Not good? Not great?" "No. Just... fine."

Still, his arguably slightly overcharitable impression of G3 performance notwithstanding, Dave makes some pretty solid points about why the iBook probably won't move to a G4 any time soon. Really, it all boils down to one overriding concern: heatcostbatterylife. The iBook's sticker price needs to stay within the budget of the average consumer/education purchaser, and G3s are cheap. Better still, they draw a lot less power than a G4, which translates into longer battery life and a notebook that doesn't get hot enough to raise blisters when applied to bare skin. Gotta love that.

That isn't to say, of course, that the iBook won't get G4tified eventually; after all, it's the only Mac in Apple's line-up that still uses a G3 (except for the old 15-inch CRT iMacs, which even Apple is trying to downplay as a "current" product). Lots of people point to the symmetry in Apple's pro/consumer/desktop/laptop product grid and insist that since the new iMacs have G4s, the iBooks should have them, too, and there's a certain appealing logic to that argument-- but there's a reason why Apple stopped billing the iBook as an "iMac To Go."

The bottom line is that the iBook does what it needs to do for the people who are supposed to be buying it. For the rest of you, suck it up and splurge on a PowerBook; complaining about the inability to render real-time Final Cut Pro effects on an iBook is unseemly. Trust us-- keep it up, and people are going to start avoiding you at parties.