It's one of life's sad little truths: when faced with a fork in the road, sometimes you make a choice you regret later. And as far as regrets go, Apple seems to have more than its fair share. There's the way they missed the chance to license the Mac OS before the whole world went Wintel. Then there's the way they licensed it too late and in such a brain-damaged, sales-cannibalizing manner. There's the years of development and millions of dollars poured into Copland before the project was scrapped. And most recently, there's the whole move to the G4 processor...

Okay, yeah, sure the G4 is one smokin' little chip. Gigaflops, and all that. Supercomputer performance. Whatever. There are a couple of serious problems, though, that are really starting to bite Apple in the behind. For one thing, that supercomputer-level performance really only kicks in when an application has been written specifically to take advantage of the G4's "Velocity Engine"-- and there are far fewer of those specialized apps than we'd like to see. And for another thing, there's this whole "stuck at 500 MHz" nonsense. We don't care how fast the G4 may in fact be; Apple's getting creamed at the Joe Shmoe marketing level, where Windows systems are available at twice Apple's fastest clock speed.

What really hurts, though, is that while Motorola is lagging with the G4, IBM is quietly cranking the G3 up to ridiculous new levels of performance. Velocity Engine aside, a 500 MHz G4 is reportedly roughly equivalent in speed to a 600 MHz G3. Well, guess what? According to The Register, IBM has just demoed its new 750CX and 750CXe G3 processors, which are expected to hit 700 MHz in the not-too-distant future. Which means it's entirely possible that the fastest G3 might soon be faster than the fastest G4-- and not just in terms of clock speed. (Yes, Motorola is supposed to have the G4 Max out by then, but we've officially adopted a policy of considering any Motorola processor to be vapor until it's actually shipping. That whole "G4 Speed Dump" fiasco was just too harsh a burn.)

So could Apple successfully switch back to G3s in its professional desktop Macs? Not likely; all that hype about the G4 being the future of computing was a textbook example of bridge-burning at its finest. To "downgrade" from the G4 to the G3 would be a PR disaster of truly biblical proportions-- we're talking "ten plagues" kind of disaster. So no, we figure that Apple's going to have to keep its fingers crossed and hope that Motorola can crank the G4 up to the performance level it deserves. If everything stays on schedule (ha!), early next year we may have dual- and quad-processor G4 Max systems running the symmetrically-multiprocessing Mac OS X-- giving customers, say, "1.4 GHz" or even "2.8 GHz" Macs to play with. We hate the "Wait 'Til Next Year!" game as much as you do, but hey, if you've been following Apple for any length of time, you're used to it by now.