So we feel a little guilty that Real Life™ has horned in on production so much that we only managed to broadcast a grand total of four new episodes through all of June (that's batting .182-- who are we, Toronto Blue Jays back-to-the-minors shortstop Jason Alfaro?), but our therapist makes a good point: just how guilty should we feel when the progress of Apple-flavored drama seems to have slowed to the glacial pace of a Department of Motor Vehicles queue on International "Everybody Communicate By Blinking In Morse Code" Day? Case in point: it's been three and a half weeks since Apple officially announced that it's bailing on PowerPC and making the tricky flailing aerial leap to Intel, allegedly because Intel's development roadmap hints at power consumption levels far more appropriate for future Macs than IBM's plans indicate, and yet we're just now hearing IBM issue its rebuttal. Which, incidentally, amounts to little more than a half-hearted "Nuh-uh!"

Well, okay, there's a little more to it than that, but frankly, given that he's had almost a month in which to craft an impressive and well-supported response to Apple's claims, we're pretty wildly unimpressed with what Rod Adkins, IBM's veep of development for its Systems and Technology Group, has been trying to pass off to eWEEK as some sort of refutation. Don't get us wrong-- we love the G5, and we consider it a testament to IBM's technical prowess that the company cranked out a chip as nifty as that. But basically, Rod says that while Big Blue "could build PowerPC chips that satisfy the needs of the entire range of Apple's product lines, including portables such as the PowerBook," it just doesn't want to. Or, more to the point, he seems to think that Apple didn't want it to.

"They had Freescale primarily for the low-end and mobile solutions," says Rod, apparently oblivious to the fact that Apple has been desperately trying to stem mass defections of Road Warriors who are turning to the Dark Side and switching to Wintel notebooks (because PowerBooks, while superb machines overall, lag somewhat horribly in the performance department). He also seems to have missed the multiple occasions over the past couple of years when Apple was forced to admit publicly to the press that, although customers were clamoring for a G5-based PowerBook and it'd love to sell them some, IBM just didn't have a smaller, low-power G5 suitable for squeezing into a laptop yet. And he even somehow spaced on that time that Steve Jobs himself, when asked about a time frame for a PowerBook G5 hitting the shelves, said "we are working on it and what we'd like is to have it by the end of next year." That was September of 2003. So while Apple has been working on the problem all this time, IBM has been, what-- playing This Little Piggy on a whole lot of toes?

Indeed, Rod almost seems to be implying that he went to Steve two years ago and said, "okay, so here's the G5 for the Power Mac-- and here's a low-power one for PowerBooks, too, since, you know, we're perfectly capable of making stuff like that, you see," to which Steve replied, "Don't you dare! We'd much rather stick with Freescale's underperforming G4. You know, the one that drove us to IBM for the G5 in the first place. You take that mobile G5 and throw it on the fire, and let us never speak of this again!" There's clearly a reality disconnect somewhere, here, and it sure sounds like it's on IBM's side to us.

Not that we're denying Rod's essential claim that "there's nothing about POWER architecture that limits you in any way in terms of power management or power efficiency." But this attitude that "IBM has the capability to deliver a product such as a mobile PowerPC 970 chip," but apparently either didn't know that Apple wanted one, or just didn't feel like it, well, that's either refreshingly honest or terrifically stupid. Or both. Meanwhile, we suppose we now know why Apple never received a 3 GHz desktop G5, either; "Wait, you mean when Steve announced to the entire planet that the G5 would hit 3 GHz within a year, that meant he actually wanted us to build one? Well, why didn't he say so?"