What with everyone being all aglow with the overweening wonderfulosity that came spilling out of Apple's Q2 earnings results a couple of days ago, we figured we'd let people bask in it for a while before we dragged us all back down into the muck. So bask, happy citizens! Bask away! Bask like there's no tomorrow! Keep basking... Keep basking... ...aaaaannnnd STOP! Okay, time to get back to business.

Here's the thing: we need to address one very interesting revelation that popped up during that conference call. Remember when PeterFred mentioned that Apple had sold "very few Xserve G5s" in Q2 because supply constraints had delayed the product until the very tail end of the quarter? Well, PeterFred made it clear that there was only a single missing component that prevented the Xserve from shipping on time-- and that crucial part was none other than the 90-nanometer PowerPC 970FX processor. Apple has officially confirmed the rumors: IBM is having trouble getting new G5s out in useful quantities. And since faster Power Mac G5s would use the same 90-nano chips as the Xserves, no wonder those speed bumps never materialized. Cooling problem, shmooling problem; it sounds like the real snag was that Apple's new Power Macs don't have anything inside to cool in the first place.

So what's up with the non-shipping chipping? Well, faithful viewer jkundert dished us a Silicon Strategies article (by way of MacDailyNews) which reports that Big Blue has come clean on its production woes: it lost $150 million in a single quarter due largely to "ongoing chip yield issues" at the East Fishkill fabrication plant where G5s are (supposed to be) cranked out. Says IBM's CFO, "we do see demand, but we need to make the products"-- and that isn't happening quickly enough to fill orders.

In other words, it's official-- there is a curse, or some kind of demonic possession, or something: whoever makes Apple's high-end processors winds up suffering otherwise inexplicable performance issues. Back when the jewel in Apple's chip line-up was the G4, Motorola proved singularly incapable of delivering the goods in reasonable quantities (forcing Apple to issue stock-decimating revenue warnings when sales would come in vastly under quota) or keeping chip development proceeding at anything close to the speed of the rest of the industry. At the same time, IBM was firing on all cylinders, lending a hand with G4 production and allegedly even cranking out faster G4s than Motorola itself was able to make. At one point IBM's G3s were almost eclipsing the speed of Motorola's G4s.

But now that the shoe's on the other foot and IBM is responsible for stuffing Apple's high-end systems with sufficient quantities of G5s, suddenly Big Blue is acting very Motorolan, causing Apple product delays by failing to show up with the necessary commodities. And while we're certainly not expecting another speed debacle like when we were all stalled out at 500 MHz for about a year and a half, since Power Mac speeds still haven't budged a megahertz since their introduction last June, we're starting to get a little skeptical of those initial claims that Apple would ship a 3.0 GHz system within a year.

Anyone know a good exorcist? Because we really think we need to nip this thing in the bud.