Another Expo has come and gone, and as we're sure you've noticed by now, new Mac portables were nowhere to be seen. Not that we're nuts enough to have been expecting a PowerBook G5 or anything crazy like that, of course, but the iBook and PowerBook lines are due for upgrades sooner rather than later, so we won't be the least bit surprised if one or both are speed-bumped some quiet Tuesday within the next few weeks. And the world will yawn and smile politely, because the new 'Books will still pack G4s in some form or other, which officially became old news about six nanoseconds after the Power Mac G5 was announced a year and a half ago and a zillion Mac users all asked with one voice, "yeah-- but when can we get one to go?"

Personally, we've resigned ourselves to the fact that we're unlikely ever to see a PowerBook G5 until pigs learn to fly, and the iBook G5 won't show up until said pigs are pulling precision synchronized barrel-rolls and loop-de-loops to the delight of cheering state fair attendees watching from far below. Honestly, when you hear that something's "a long way off" enough times, eventually your brain simply accepts that it's always going to be a long way off-- and yes, as far as portable G5s are concerned, our own grey matter reached that point sometime back in October. From our perspective, when Apple Veep o' Worldwide Sales 'n' Ops Tim Cook just recently described the act of wedging a G5 into a laptop as "the mother of all thermal challenges," that was just business as usual-- and when, asked whether that meant there might never be a PowerBook G5, he simply declined to comment any further, well, that wasn't much of a shock to us, either.

So what was a shock to us was when faithful viewer iain forwarded us a DigiTimes article which is primarily about the Taiwanese manufacturers tasked with cranking out Mac minis and iPod shuffles, but which mentions in passing that "Asustek will also start shipping iBook G5 notebooks to Apple in the second quarter of this year."

Say what, now?

Just a typo, you say? Well, we figured as much, too-- but the very following line about "shipments of the current iBook notebooks" in the last calendar quarter certainly seems to be drawing a distiction between the existing iBook G4 and this where-the-heck-did-THAT-come-from iBook G5. And it gets weirder; if the "G5" thing was a typo, it's a darn persistent one, because a graph accompanying the article lists Asustek as the manufacturer of the "iBook/iBook G5" and reiterates that the iBook G5 is set "to start shipping in 2Q 2005"-- and also lists Quanta Computer as the maker of the "PowerBook G5," also with a delivery date of 2Q 2005. Clearly this is no simple typo.

Dare we believe that there's some insider info at work, here? Is it really and truly possible that Apple is preparing to move its entire portable lineup to some form of G5 as early as April? After all, that sounds really soon to us, but it's nearly two full years after the G5 first appeared, so it's not that crazy an idea, right? Heck, faithful viewer James Muir even sent us a TechNewsWorld article which reports that an independent analysis of the G5 processor by the technical services company Chipworks Inc. concludes that the G5 "allows 'significant cost and power reductions'" and its PowerTune power scaling technology "allows operation as low as 15 W." Surely that's plenty low enough to cram into a laptop, right?

But we're not going to get our hopes up. Historically, the accuracy of reports from these Taiwanese manufacturer sources has been spotty at best, and seeing as the chart in that article appears to claim that Apple shipped over ten million iPods in 2004 (it didn't; there have been 10 million iPods shipped since it debuted in 2001, about 8.2 million of which shipped last year), we can't exactly see DigiTimes as a Shining Beacon of Truth™. But if you're a road warrior with a need for speed, DigiTimes has handed you a nice little thread of hope to cling to, especially after Tim Cook did his best to plunge you into a pit of despair. Whether or not you want to grab hold of it is up to you; personally, we'll wait for Piggy Aerobatics.