So, what... did Steve Jobs spit on a gypsy a few years back or something? Because the PowerPC Alliance seems to be afflicted by some kind of curse; whoever designs and produces Apple's high-end chips gets smacked upside the head with the Cosmic Lead Pipe of Karma. Nobody could forget that Motorola spent years trying to squeeze a little more performance out of the G4 as impatient Mac users tapped their feet and stared pointedly at their watches, and we all know how that turned out; Motorola's inability to escape from a positively glacial G4 improvement cycle was almost Shemplike in its failure. Blinding incompetence, or vengeful gypsy hex? Meanwhile, the company was laying off thousands of employees every twelve seconds and shutting down plants even as analysts kept telling it to sell off its semiconductor division before it dragged the company down to the murky depths of inescapable financial insolvency like some kind of slimy water zombie with dead, staring eyes and seaweed draped across its putrescent shoulders and... well, you get the general idea.

Anyway, eventually Apple decided that it didn't feel like sharing a premature watery grave, so it sought out the help of IBM-- both to manufacture G3s and Motorola-designed G4s (when Motorola couldn't keep up with demand) and to work on the G5, since the odds of the increasingly embedded-obsessed Moto surviving long enough to ship a next-generation PowerPC (at least, one that was appropriate for use in anything but a fridge that knows how cold you like your soda) seemed slim at best. And then things seemed good for Apple, at least in terms of the IBM relationship; the G4 shortfalls fell away, and the only problem with IBM's G3s was that they were occasionally faster than the G4s, which led to a bit of strife with Apple's whole "G3s for consumers, G4s for pros" strategy. And the G5, well, the chip's here ahead of schedule and it looks like one mother of a mover, and some people think it represents Apple's salvation. All good stuff.

But, as we said, what if Motorola's PowerPC woes weren't just the result of its own ineptitude, but rather sprung forth from some Evil Eye whammy that makes life miserable for whomever dares to try to bring Mac processor speed within competitive range of the Wintel set? We ask simply because suddenly IBM looks to be hitting a rough patch of its own, and we just hope this isn't the start of a Motorola-style Cavalcade of Ickiness"™. See, faithful viewer Mark G. tipped us off to a Reuters article about how Big Blue's $3 billion processor fabrication plant (you know, the one that figures so heavily in Apple's marketing fluff) is a "headache" due to "production problems" and is therefore "a reason why [IBM's] microchip business would lose money this year."

It seems that IBM's state-of-the-art plant "lost $110 million in the second quarter" ("Now, where the heck did I put that $110 million? I know I had it here a minute ago...") and now looks to lose money for the year, instead of contributing to an overall IBM profit. It might be nothing, of course-- just an early-days hiccup that temporarily knocked four bucks off IBM's stock price. But if we start hearing about copious layoffs and plant closures and, instead of reaching 3 GHz in a year as promised, the G5 languishes at 2.1 GHz until 2006, we'll know something supernatural is at work. Anyone know a good exorcist?