You know, Apple really flooded us with plot twists in the form of eleventy-seventy press releases yesterday, so we didn't get to tackle some of the quieter things poking around in the dark corners of the Mac universe. But now that we've taken care of all that stuff about the new iPods and faster iMacs and ten million songs sold and Steve Jobs wearing a beard of bees at the office because the buzzing makes him feel just like he's right back at home on the Hive Moon of Mellipherus 4 (wait... actually, did we run out of time yesterday before we could squeeze that last one in? Eh, never mind), so we're free to ramble incoherently about some of the fringier whispers rustling in the breeze-- like all that stuff about future G4s not being G4s at all.

You may recall a similar scenario that got kicked around a couple of years ago: back when Motorola had all but dropped its own G5 right off the bottom of the PowerPC roadmap and before IBM came swooping in to save the day, there were rumors that Steve planned on shipping a beefed-up Power Mac with a new G4 processor inside and just calling it a G5; after all, the whole "G" thing is technically just Apple's marketing nomenclature, so if it wanted to it could even ship a 68030 and rebrand it as a G12 just for giggles. Well, the latest incarnation of the Name Game is described over at Mac OS Rumors, as pointed out by faithful viewer Dan Boyle: future G4s may actually be G3s.

But not in a bad way! See, while Motorola has been floundering with the "supercomputer" G4 for the past half a decade or so, not only has IBM run rings around it with the G5, but it's also made almost ridiculously impressive improvements to the G3-- yes, the G3, which Apple's marketing department tried to make us believe was so pathetically slow and outdated compared to that spiffy "couldn't even export it to scary countries" G4. And the truly remarkable thing (well, remarkable as far as IBM's concerned; from Motorola's standpoint this is actually sort of pathetic) is that apparently IBM's latest and future G3 designs are actually faster than Motorola's best G4s-- and will probably boast a "cooler operating temperature and significantly lower power drain," too.

The gist of the whole sitch is that IBM's latest G3s are almost more G4-y than Motorola's G4s (yes, they'll even have Altivec), so Apple may well slap 'em into future lower-end Macs, call 'em G4s, and tell Motorola to take its slow-developin', non-chip-shippin' kiester away to go play in traffic once and for all. Just think of it: a Mac future that doesn't hinge on the chipmaking prowess of a mobile phone manufacturer. Why, we can hardly wrap our heads 'round the concept.

Meanwhile, IBM seems to be firing on all cylinders, PowerPC-wise; word has it that the minor Power Mac G5 delays were not caused by a dearth of processors (chalk it up to a worldwide shortage of thermal zones-- each Power Mac chews up four, ya know), and we hear that development of future G5 chip iterations is actually progressing ahead of schedule. Now, sure, with Apple's luck, as soon as IBM becomes its single source for PowerPC processors, Big Blue will probably undergo some sort of karmic corporate lobotomy and we can once again look forward to processors shipping in quantities of 6 and 50 MHz performance increases every two years, but until that happens, we should kick back and enjoy the dream.